There is a lot of excitement about new technology in customer service, support and success. The progress of video, real time messaging, chatbots, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, self-service and even customer success itself are the potential for big changes in the day-to-day workings of customer success practitioners.

The new technology will come with challenges. Also there is a steep learning curve when it comes for learning to use and adapt the new technologies.

They can be costly for business to implement and there is the looming concern which we feel about the new technology. Here I am discussing about seven predictions and trends of the future customer support:

Expanding Community-based customer support

By community based customer support, we are referring to our customers to form a community among themselves and help one another solve issues.

Customers enjoy the interaction with each other in a waywhich increases their engagement with our brand.

We can easily provide a venue where our customers can form their own community. We can create a forum which is accessible through our website that only our customers can access with their login credentials.

Personalized Customer Support

As the customers interact with the company they leave a trail of data. Our customer track all the cases of customer support as well as the behavior of the customers display such as opening mails, visiting web pages, downloading content etc.

Customer support repository will increasingly be expected to leverage that data to personalize the support provided by the customers.

Support Quality

Since customers are expecting a higher quality support, quality of support will result in higher qualities of customer churn. A walker info report says that, customer experience will overtake price and product as the main driver behind the purchasing decision of customer by 2020.

Our brand will maintain a reputation as a company that delivers a world-class customer support. Otherwise, we will lose the existing customers and we have to acquire the new ones which will become more difficult.

If our customer-support efforts are not so much satisfactory, customer loyalty and satisfaction will decline and for that our brand reputation will suffer.

One thing is that, without a positive brand reputation and loyal, satisfied customers our revenue growth will slow down considerably. Satisfied customers lead to business and revenue growth.

Bots free up for support repository

We can see the customer support chatbots on a variety of websites and they continue to popup everywhere. They connect to our knowledge base and can answer basic questions what customers ask about our product or service.

The data is stored in our customer relationship management solution and bots are typically integrated with CRM. If we can use an all-in-one CRM that provides full sales, marketing and help-desk capabilities, all the data captured by each of those functions is stored in a central database for bots to access.

Customer Expectations

The quality of customer support is increasing rapidly now-a-days. Companies who deliver world-class support have set the bar high and customers now expect the same quality of support of every company in any industry.

While competition is rising in nearly every industry, it is easier than ever for a customer to leave us for a competitor. So if we don’t provide a great quality support and meet the expectations of customers, our customers are likely to leave us for a competitor that will.

Increasing Complaints in social media

Social media usage will certainly continue to increase as millennial’s overtake baby boomers in the largest consumer demographic. So every consumer carries a mobile device whenever they go.

If they had a bad experience with our company, they will not wait until they complain about it. Also they can go straight and share their experience publicly.

Complaints in social media

Growing self-service support

Most customers like to solve their own issues. As per HBR report, 81% of customers across all industries attempt to resolve their issue themselves before contacting a live customer support repository.

Customers can save time when they can easily find a resolution of their problem without even opening a help-desk ticket.