The five most important customer service trends for 2020

At a time when communication runs through various apps and consumers place higher demands on service, offering better customer service becomes an ever harder challenge. In 2020 it will mainly be about Customer Experience (CX), chatbots and conversational design. Do you want to improve your customer service this year? Then you certainly should not miss these customer service trends for 2020!

Time as the new CX currency

While a few years ago consumers were still satisfied with a two-day delivery time, now it cannot go fast enough. These days same-day delivery, delivery within two hours and evening delivery are the most normal state of affairs. Consumers want to have their ordered product in the house as fast as possible. This high consumer demand also brings an advantage with it: the faster the delivery time, the higher the conversion, as Bol.com proves. Speed will become a distinguishing factor in 2020. So distinguishing, in fact, that KIRC expects speed to become a structural part of the Customer Effort Score (CES). Consumers place ever higher demands on speed and are increasingly willing to pay for it, according to research by Capgemini.

High quality of answers

With content marketing you create, publish and promote engaging and relevant information, with the aim of getting attention for your brand or organisation. With this attention you ultimately generate profitable leads. In content marketing there is often a lot of attention for the form, content and quality of the information to be distributed. Despite this attention, it turns out that the information is often not adequate for the consumer.

The FAQ is missing, is incomplete, cannot be found and is often not user-friendly. Finding the right answer often takes forever. It is then easier to get in touch with customer service, but this does not always go optimally either. Consumers are often not helped properly when they report a complaint or ask another question, according to research by the Consumentenbond. The response from customer service does not give the answer to the consumer's question. Companies have to focus more on the customer experience, so that consumers' problems and questions are resolved in a good way.

The ROI of CX becomes important

Customer experience is the new brand according to Forbes. In 2020 customer service will be completely replaced by the optimised customer experience. Most companies have already started on this, by beginning to work with new KPIs, customer journeys and personas. The Nederlandse Spoorwegen is an example of this; last year they overhauled their distribution system. NS has begun to focus on innovation in the interest of improving the customer experience, according to them the most important focus point in the sector. To uncover and develop the ultimate customer journey, NS carries out customer research frequently. Customer experience becomes more important than ever in 2020.

Chatbots get smarter and are going to show emotions

The role Artificial Intelligence plays in our lives is ever greater, according to research by Emerce. The chatbot is indispensable and in 2020 chatbots are going to give more support in complex situations. KIRC predicts that it will not be long before the chatbot has fully transformed into a voicebot: a chatbot that talks to the consumer via speech recognition. The voicebot helps solve the consumer's problems by first forming a picture of the context and then responding to the consumer's ‘audible’ emotions. Through this emotion recognition by the voicebot, a conversation looks more and more like a human conversation, which means the consumer is helped even better.

The smartphone gets an even bigger role

The smartphone is already impossible to imagine our daily lives without. The consumer mainly uses the smartphone to stay connected with friends, family and companies. Companies have to respond more to the fact that this phone is nearby at all times. That is why Google is shifting from a desktop index to a mobile-first index, in which the focus lies on mobile user-friendliness. When you focus on this you also get a better ranking position, a win-win situation!

Customer service remains in development. The coming year, customer service will be dominated by customer experience, chatbots and conversational design. Good customer service does not only make customers happy; your company benefits from it too. Good customer service sets your company apart from the competition. In 2020 it is time to leave the competition far behind you! What are you going to do to improve your customer service?

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