March 2023 Summaries

The Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report 2023 highlights that despite economic challenges, customer support teams feel more prepared than ever to face upcoming difficulties. To maximize existing resources while meeting and exceeding customer expectations, leaders are focusing on optimizing automated workflows with new AI tools, investing in proactive and self-serve support to get ahead of questions, and reinforcing team talent through internal QA and coaching. These strategies enable teams to improve efficiency, reduce wait times, and provide personalized support that meets and exceeds customer expectations, ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction.

Libor Bitala, Head of Support at ROI Hunter, a SaaS company that helps e-commerce retailers make data-driven decisions on product promotion in ads. Libor values patience and believes it's crucial in dealing with critical issues, as well as having a toolbox full of helpful resources to understand the issue. He finds satisfaction in discovering the context behind an issue and appreciates human-level connection in his work. Libor has had negative experiences with poorly designed chatbots but praises the smooth returns process for one e-commerce retailer in his country. He believes customer support is not just an entry-level position, requiring a unique combination of soft and hard skills.

Support goes global: Localization for customer service teams is a major part of Intercom's goal to make internet business personal. The process involves tailoring products to fit local cultures and languages, allowing users across the world to get the same great experience within the product. With more than 25,000 businesses using Intercom to serve customers in over 130 countries, the platform hosts millions of conversations in countless languages. To support this, Intercom is continuously improving its language offerings through a step-by-step process, adding new languages such as French, German, Spanish and Portuguese across various functions. This enables customers to offer personalized services, localize their Help Center with just a few clicks, and configure it to support multiple languages. By doing so, Intercom aims to help businesses attract talent, increase conversion rates, and boost employee retention by enabling support teams to work in the language they're most comfortable with.

AI is poised to significantly impact the nature of customer service work, but not in a purely negative way. Customer service teams are already under immense pressure and often struggle to provide excellent experiences due to the high volume of questions they need to answer. However, with the latest AI models, it's feasible that 50%+ of questions can be accurately and immediately answered, freeing up customer service reps to focus on more complex issues and providing a better overall experience for customers. This shift could lead to smaller teams, more interesting and rewarding jobs, and even new types of roles emerging as companies design, orchestrate, and analyze the customer experience that blends AI and human interaction.

In this guide, Intercom explores the concept of CX personalization, highlighting its importance in today's competitive and rapidly changing business landscape. The guide emphasizes that CX personalization is not just about knowing a customer's name or sending a congratulatory card on their birthday, but rather an end-to-end, data-driven strategy that takes into account customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors to deliver relevant experiences across all touchpoints in the customer journey. Personalization empowers companies to differentiate themselves from competitors, create competitive advantage, increase customer loyalty, and drive business growth. The guide provides 8 steps to personalize customer experiences at scale, including collecting first-party data, building a unified customer platform, creating user personas, helping customers where and when they need it, designing personalized communication flows, boosting personalization efforts with automation and AI, assembling cross-functional, customer-centric teams, and iterating and refining the strategy. The guide also highlights examples of great personalized CX, such as recommendation algorithms used by Amazon and Netflix, personalized marketing done right by Spotify, using customer feedback to fuel growth, building integrated experiences, and what not to do in terms of overpersonalization and privacy concerns. Ultimately, CX personalization is a business necessity that unlocks customer loyalty, engagement, retention, and double-digit revenue growth.

Fin, Intercom's newly announced AI chatbot built on GPT-4, aims to provide a natural conversation ability similar to modern AI while reducing hallucinations and inaccurate responses. Fin is designed to converse naturally, answer questions about businesses using controlled information, reduce hallucinations, require minimal configuration, and work "out of the box" with existing help centers. The chatbot can engage in natural conversations, understand queries spanning multiple turns, refuse to respond to out-of-domain questions, and provide accurate answers based on content in the existing help center. Fin has been built using OpenAI's GPT-4 model, combining it with Intercom's Resolution Bot technology. The AI is designed to be trustworthy and has measures to reduce user attempts to circumvent its constraints. While not perfect, Fin is expected to improve over time and can be configured to suit different business tradeoffs. Its implementation may require some upfront cost due to the large language models used, but Intercom believes it will be ROI-positive for many businesses.

You satisfy your customers, but can you satisfy our curiosity?` This statement is from Line Granseth, the Head of Customer Service at Morgenlevering AS, a Norwegian website that delivers freshly baked goods to customers' doorsteps. The company's goal is not only to please its customers but also to engage with them and understand their needs. According to Line, customer service should focus on providing a great front-end experience, understanding the customers' needs, and being empathetic. She believes that connection and empathy are unique qualities that bots cannot replicate. When asked about her greatest productivity hack, she mentions using an energy-boosting playlist to stay focused during video calls. Line also shares some humorous anecdotes about customer interactions, such as a customer asking for her address so he could send a bottle of champagne, and another who had a great experience with a refund despite making a mistake. The conversation is filled with Line's personality, humor, and valuable insights into the world of customer service.

To maintain a high-performing customer service team, it's essential to create a plan to develop and nurture talent. This involves setting clear expectations for growth and progression within the team, defining customer service success metrics, and ensuring that people management is not the only career advancement path available. By embedding product experts from the support team into product teams, organizations can bridge the gap between support and product teams, maintain a strong customer focus, and nurture customer service talent. The key to successful development of customer service talent lies in providing options for growth, empowering team members to take the next step, and offering a clear progression path that aligns with individual goals and interests.

Customer service is a crucial aspect of modern business, providing support to customers throughout their journey and addressing their needs by resolving issues, troubleshooting problems, and helping them get the most from a product or service. The quality of customer service can make or break a business's growth, with 89% of companies expecting to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience (CX) and 93% of customers likely to return and make repeat purchases at companies with excellent service. Good customer service has several key traits, including personalization, fast and efficient replies, and resolving problems. It can be delivered through various channels such as in-person, automated, or a combination of both, and is essential for building long-term customer relationships, improving retention, and increasing the likelihood of customers expanding their business with a company. By leveraging technology and automation, businesses can deliver personalized support that ticks all the right boxes and sets them apart from the competition.

Customer experience (CX) refers to the sum of every interaction a customer has with your business, encompassing people and products across multiple touchpoints. It directly impacts whether customers will want to continue doing business with you, with 88% of customers saying it's as important as product or services. A great CX helps businesses reduce churn, improve retention rates, build brand loyalty and trust, and grow revenue. Key elements include personalized experiences, omnichannel interactions, efficiency, convenience, knowledgeability, friendliness, human interaction, and personalization. Businesses can design CX by empowering customers to self-serve, delivering personalized experiences, supporting customers right where they are, using bots and automation, and staying human at scale. Measuring CX involves customer satisfaction metrics like NPS or CSAT scores, as well as voice of the customer programs and surveys to gather insights and act on feedback. Great CX examples prioritize efficiency, convenience, knowledgeability, friendliness, human interaction, and personalization, such as using in-product messaging, chatbots, and automation to provide seamless experiences.

Built for You is the February edition of a software development update, featuring new workload management features that allow users to scale real-time support and prioritize conversations based on business priorities. The update also includes checklists for onboarding customers, which provide personalized guidance to help them complete tasks and engage with the product. Additionally, there are updates to articles, including auto-saving, versioning, and activity logs, as well as customizable email signatures and attachments that can be added to tickets. Furthermore, there is an integration between Zendesk's Guide for help center articles and Intercom, allowing users to seamlessly connect their content across platforms. The update also includes API 2.8, which adds team priority levels and admin priority levels in Teams, as well as new webhook topics for when a conversation is assigned. Finally, there are updates to email templates, including previewing templates, duplicating custom templates, and customizing the look of emails with more visual possibilities.

The importance of a customer support operations (CS Ops) team cannot be overstated. A CS Ops team is essential for balancing efficiency with great customer experience, meeting rising customer expectations, and keeping team morale high while ensuring that the budget and team are not overwhelmed. The aim of CS Ops is to increase the effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity of customer support teams by guiding operational, strategic, and technical processes. A CS Ops team can help reduce strain on support managers, empower support reps to work more efficiently, and deliver insights for an excellent customer experience. Key roles in a CS Ops team include the customer support operations manager, systems analyst, developer, and support trainer. These roles are crucial for optimizing workflows, tool implementation, and resource management, maximizing team efficiency, allowing support reps to focus on customers, facilitating career development, and prioritizing long-term team strategy. To get started with CS Ops, one can map out existing workflows, hire the right people, and use the right support tools. By doing so, organizations can ensure their support teams are operating at full potential, providing a great customer experience while being efficient and productive.