5 Customer Support Trends In 2022

Did you just start a business on Shopify and it’s growing like crazy? Soon, or maybe already, you will need support for your customers. Superhappy is here and ready to provide you with a well-stocked knowledge base and customer help center for your Shopify store. As your business continues to grow, here are some major trends to be on the lookout for in 2022.

Omnichannel Support

Omnichannel support will be one of the biggest trends in 2022 to keep up with a huge trend from 2021– Omnichannel marketing. Simply put, omnichannel marketing is a strategy that combines all customer communication interaction points such as social media, emails, texts, website, phone apps, and more, to provide customers with a consistent and unified brand experience.

Nowadays, people expect to be able to contact your company through more than just phone or email. Omnichannel support means that your customer service is accessible through multiple platforms, such as email, phone calls, chat, social media sites, and text. 

Most importantly, customer service should be available in every area where marketing takes place. This means you are able to interact with your customers wherever they prefer! Omni-channel support also means that you're able to provide a similar experience across all channels of support. 

Through following the omnichannel customer service trend, companies can create a seamless customer experience and gain maximum customer satisfaction.

Chatbots

Chatbots aren’t exactly new, but they’re becoming even more important. What's a chatbot you ask? A chatbot is a software program that helps your customers just like a human would! Through picking up on keywords your customer uses, they can provide correct responses or lead them to appropriate resources to help solve their problem. 

Here are some of the common things chatbots can do for your customers:

• Provide resources for FAQs 
• Provide 24/7 assistance regardless of geolocation
• Direct customers to self-help tools
• Track orders
• Provide customers with ideas for inspiration
• Settle a customer’s grievances 
• Sign customers up for email subscriptions
• Accept Payments
• Send customers to the right support team

Finally, chatbots are an economical way to expand your customer service. Chatbots save time and relieve pressure from your support team by answering the most basic questions for them. Customer support representatives often get tired of answering the same questions over and over again, and chatbots take a lot of the brunt work typically associated with customer support. 

Hyper-Personalization and AI

You've got to know your customers! It's important to know their previous orders, and perhaps some of the trending items they've looked at on your sites. Knowing your customers will help them feel valued. Allowing your customers to feel special because of the personalized interactions you will have with them makes it more likely they will want to share their positive experience with others. They could even become an advocate for your brand! In 2022, it's easy to adopt AI that will allow for a greater level of personalization. 

So how can you get to know your customers personally and make them feel valued when you don't actually see your customers face-to-face? Especially if you have an online business, or hundreds or thousands of customers each month, AI will be essential for your business. 

Because of AI, you can personalize every interaction you have with your customers. Here's a few ways AI can improve your customer's experience:

• Recommend relevant products based on their search history
• Send a reminded text/email when they abandon their cart
• Send birthday emails or other emails to celebrate special events and sales
• Recommend tutorials based on their search history
• Send out company news they would be interested in. Ex. Maybe they only shop in your recycled fashion section. Send news out when your company chooses more environmentally friendly options. 

This is just the start! The more information you can gain about your customers, the more personalized your interactions can become with them. 

Self-service

People are empowered to be self-sufficient in today’s world. Customers often want ways to solve their own problems. In 2022, businesses MUST ensure that each channel you use directs your customers to self-service resources. This way, customers can resolve problems on their own which saves time, money, and can empower your customer-base.

According to a Harvard Business Review, 88% of customers expect organizations to offer a self-service support portal. With the next generation of consumers growing up in the digital age, many users want quick and simple answers without having to reach out or talk to anyone personally.

For many people, an excellent customer service interaction may not be a direct representative-to-customer interaction at all. This might include elements such as an FAQ page, chatbots, or a comprehensive knowledge base like Superhappy. In addition to pleasing the customer, self-service tools (similar to chatbots) take a lot of pressure off of your customer support team. 

With the right resources, customers are empowered to successfully solve their own inquiries, often in less time than a service rep can. This can reduce the burden on your customer support team, and frees them up to focus on more complex, hands-on tickets. 

Agent empowerment

We all know that customer support representatives have one of the hardest jobs in the industry. They are constantly interacting with customers who have a problem and unfortunately aren’t dealing with many people hopping on chat to simply say “Thank you.” A good customer service representative masters the balancing act of pleasing your customer while maximizing the company’s profits.

Your company's customer support team is the face of your brand. This team includes a large number of people such as the receptionist, support techs, support reps, cashiers, store associates, and really anyone who "supports" your customer base. Anyone who deals with customers should be empowered to do more than the bare-minimum. You want your customers walking away feeling like they just talked to the more knowledgeable support rep in the world. One who has been trained well and has all the tools they need to solve the customer’s problems. 

A recent trend that’s on the rise is agent empowerment. Organizations accomplish this through providing their customer support teams with more training, autonomy, better tools, team bonding experiences, and higher pay. This level of trust and autonomy demands an increase in training, but over the next year, organizations will develop and invest into ongoing training to ensure that their customer service teams know what to do when a problem arises.

Superhappy can help!

Superhappy can provide your growing business with a vast Shopify knowledge-base that helps customers resolve common problems quickly and reduce your team's workload. Add our Shopify app to your store to get started today!

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