The customer experience trends for service companies in 2023
Customer satisfaction should be one of the most important business goals for 2023. But what does outstanding customer care mean for professional services?
Changing buyer behaviour on the market
Today, information is always and everywhere publicly available on the web. This increases customer expectations and therefore also the demands on service companies. According to a survey, 68% of B2B buyers research online in advance without speaking to a contact person (source: LinkedIn). Furthermore, in the age of digitalisation, 75% expect the contact persons in the company to already know the level of information (source: Forrester) and offer concrete solutions to problems.
This means that customers are digitally savvy in the course of digital transformation and therefore have higher expectations of customer service. An outstanding customer experience, as offered by companies such as Amazon & Co, is therefore becoming a challenging but not impossible task.
Going the extra mile - but how?
In order to stand out in customer interactions, it is important not only to fulfil customers' expectations, but to exceed them. This can be achieved through small gestures that make customers feel important. This means, for example, that service employees take the time to thoroughly check the customer's history in order to be able to deal with enquiries in a more personalised way. This makes the service more personalised and professional, and customer relationships can be built stronger.
A well-functioning CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is essential for high service standards. CRM (Customer Relationship Management)-system. The software provides a 360-degree view of customers and helps to ensure that everyone involved in your service company is on the same page. It helps employees not only to engage with customers, but more importantly to build a long-term relationship. It also enables the customer service teams to work more closely with the marketing and sales teams and improve the customer experience through targeted cross-selling and upselling. In this way, the departments pursue a common goal: to turn leads and existing customers into enthusiastic fans.
And this pays off: according to surveys, coordinated project teams and optimised collaboration in project management improve customer loyalty by 36%. The faster increase in revenue is 24% (source: LinkedIn).
Artificial intelligence in customer service
The automation of complex service tasks is becoming increasingly important in order to offer timely, personalised services while conserving resources. Artificial intelligence helps companies to deliver personalised marketing messages and better predict customer behaviour. This includes technologies such as natural language processing, chatbots and recommendation engines, which ensure that customers are served even faster at every point of the customer journey.
The trick is to combine self-service chatbots with live service to ensure a dynamic customer experience. After all, real WOW moments for customers in the service sector require the perfect interplay of artificial intelligence, automation and personalised service (empathy).
Our conclusion
Companies can no longer afford to remain inactive. Focusing on efficient and resource-saving customer service is one of the most important things a service company can do at the start of the new year.
When companies improve their customer service, they demonstrably increase their turnover. A perfect interplay of AI, automation and personalised service is the key to a WOW customer experience and achieving corporate goals.
This might also interest you
Invest time in building up your knowledge. This will put you in a stronger position for the future. Our webinars are also available on-demand - whatever suits you best.
