Well, when a year ended and another new year starts, there seems to be predictions everywhere. And these predictions are necessary since they are the reference along with your previous year statistics to help you do better job this year.

This article will show you some good predictions on the customer service trends in 2016. I hope this will be helpful for your customer service department as well as your business.

Some notable customer service statistics in 2015

Of course, predictions should be based on statistics and numbers. I won’t give out false predictions which come from nowhere. So before talking about the 2016 trends, let’s take a look at some impressive numbers in customer service in 2015 to have a sight of what will take place in 2016.

• 76% of consumers say customer service in their eye is the key that defines how much a company values them (source)
• 60% of consumers say that they have higher expectations for customer service now than they did just one year ago (source)
• 77% of US online adults say that the most important thing a company can do to show that its customer service is good is by valuing customer’s time (source)
• 97% of global consumers say that the important factor that keeps their loyalty to a brand is customer service (source)
• 62% of global consumers have stopped doing business with a brand or organization due to a poor customer service experience (source)
• 73% of consumers want to solve product/service issues on their own; one-third say they don’t prefer talking with customer service (rather go cleaning the toilet) (source)
• 60% of consumers have a more favorable view of the brand if their self-service offering is mobile-responsive (source)

And according to Forrester:

• 90% of consumers say they expect consistency and continuity from a brand across channels.
• 36% of contact centers have implemented multichannel integration to provide consistent experiences.
• 70% do not train agents to support multiple channels, and 56% do not offer an agent-facing knowledge management solution.

Top customer service trends to watch in 2016

Top customer service trends in 2016

Your customers are smarter. The smarter you are to get bigger, the smarter your customers are too. Customers nowadays has become very smart to sniff out a marketing tactic you use on them to get them buy. And they do become more demanding due to that reason. There’s no way to reach customers plainly via marketing guerilla tricks. You will need to attack their emotion and win their heart and more to become the brand they love.

Mobility overthrows almost everything else. Talking about mobility is not a new issue any more. A company that ignores the mobile friendliness is a dumb one. People now mainly use their mobile to access everything, not mainly from a desktop or a PC anymore. So this year, don’t forget to invest in merging mobile information and other data to build a united view of your customer experience – whether it’s on desktop, PC or mobile.

Multichannel – as always. Be it live chat, phone, forum, ticket or email, your customers still use many different kinds of support channels to reach you. Keep maintaining all of them or just focus on the ones your customers prefer most? Take a look at the numbers you get from 2015 and find the answer.

Your customers want more self-service. It’s a good sign that customers now are willing to find the solution on their own before reaching the support center. What should you do? Improve your FAQs, simplify the way to post questions in forum for customers, or provide more “how-to” tutorial videos. Self-service is believed to be more effective and time-saving for customers than contacting customer service center.

You need to train your crew better. Look at the numbers above, a large amount of companies doesn’t train their agents. And look at 60% of people will leave due to a bad customer service experience. Be proactive in training your staff for better workforce.

In a nutshell

What were trending in 2015 have still been trending in 2016, do you agree? Customer service’s principles haven’t been changed much each year but when looking back, you’ll see the whole picture still changes for the better for customers.

Just keep on doing a good job with customer service and you’ll grow!

Related Article: Smart Customer Service: Let Customers Support Themselves – Why Not?