Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Here are the newest integrations from Zendesk to help your agents provide great customer experiences.

Making a bad hire in any role brings a number of issues. Finding a replacement is expensive, and the quick turnover often lowers team morale. When hiring a customer success manager, making a poor choice is especially damaging. This position is critical for maintaining and nurturing long-term customer relationships. If you choose someone who is a poor fit, you're likely to see lower retention rates. In the long run, that means less revenue.

42 percent of people in the world have a smartphone, and 87 percent of smartphone owners use messaging. Let those numbers sink in for a minute... Customers overwhelmingly want to interact with businesses on the same messaging channels they use in their personal lives. Messaging already had the highest customer satisfaction score of any support channel before COVID-19, with a CSAT of 98 percent.

Customer support reps have to be knowledgeable about the products and/or services their company sells so that they can accurately answer customer questions. They also need to be aware of company policy so that they always interact with customers in brand-approved ways. But teaching new team members these things when they work outside a central office can be difficult. To do so, you need a stellar onboarding plan.

Messaging has the highest customer satisfaction score of any support channel, with a CSAT of 98 percent. It makes sense: messaging is fast, personal, secure, and asynchronous—in other words; customers can pick the conversation up at their own convenience, without losing the conversation history. But providing the seamless conversational interactions customers expect requires more than simply offering messaging channels. It starts with choosing the right messaging partner.

For up-and-coming companies, seeing the business grow can be immensely fulfilling. Yet it can also be a bit unsettling—as customer service requests increase, it often falls on a single employee or very small team to manage them all. And for a business that’s working overtime to get a foothold in the market, going on a hiring spree doesn’t make much financial sense—and even if it did, that team likely wouldn’t have sufficient tools in place.

Businesses often narrowly focus on growth and what it takes to acquire a new customer. But the investment into nourishing existing customers and showing them appreciation pays dividends. In fact, acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one and increasing customer retention rates by just 5 percent can increase profits by up to 95 percent.

When you think about your best customer service experience, what comes to mind? Maybe it was the barista who knew your name and just how you like your latte. Or that time you called customer service, and the agent sympathized with you, then went out of their way to fix the issue. An excellent customer experience can change the way you think about a company, and it can create real loyalty.

Time to put away that crystal ball. If anything, 2020 has taught us to embrace a certain level of unpredictability in our lives. And while a global pandemic probably didnʼt enter into most peopleʼs plans, one thing is sure: we will be feeling its impacts for the foreseeable future. No sprint to the finish line here. For support teams, this might feel a little daunting. And why not? Customers are reaching out in record numbers. Your team may still be working from home.

You might say this is one of the worst possible times to be growing a business, but that’s not necessarily the case. On our new Sit Down Startup podcast, we talked to founders about how a customer-focused approach can help you thrive even as the world transforms before your eyes. They shared their thoughts on customer experience, empathy and hope as we look to the future. Read on for a few lessons from some inspiring founders.