With the world changing so rapidly in the last months, companies have had to adapt quickly to customer service changing as well. Depending on the type of business, this might have been an increase, a decrease or a change in the type of support cases. Cloudideas looked into the data that describes the current state of customer support to see what has changed in the past few months and what kind of solutions we can bring forward to address the new challenges.

Navigating through the clouds

The percentage of so-called ‘difficult’ calls increased twice over March 2020  —  from the typical 10% level to more than 20% according to the study from HBR.

Those who have experienced that rise in their niche know how hard it can be to navigate their customers through uncertainty and constantly changing environment with new challenges appearing every day.

So how can businesses help those on the frontline? What major challenges are they facing and what are the solutions for these?

Overwhelming requests

The request volume in customer service has spiked in March 2020 compared to February 2020. Especially affected are the companies in Telecom (+68%), Financial Services (+53%) and Healthcare (+52%).

At the same time, according to Salesforce’s research, 9 channels are used, on average, by consumers to communicate with companies while 70% of customers expect consistent experiences across channels.

Sometimes, it can get quite overwhelming for customer support agents to respond to a large number of cases coming from multiple channels. Service Cloud can help with its omni-channel experience for customers and agents and bring all communication into one platform. It can as well decrease their workload with the help of chatbots.

Overcoming technical challenges

About 30% of the organizations in the recent study say that they lack the necessary technology infrastructure while 40% of their senior employees claim the need to boost their technical skills to catch up with “the new normal” remote work environment.

Do you feel like it’s a good time to upgrade your organizations’ Salesforce skills?  Cloudideas can help to gain that knowledge fast in the trainings and seminars for every level of competency and skills  —  from sales and customer service specialists to developers, from individual coaching to mid-size groups.

Cutting through longer waiting times

Despite the spike in chat requests, most customers do love calling. Especially for complex and urgent issues, and with the rapid changes in the crisis times practically, every issue becomes urgent, complex and unprecedented.

Accenture claims that 57% of customers prefer to solve urgent issues by calling a support number and name the phone as their initial channel of preference in order to have an opportunity to negotiate, ask and explain in a more human way.

In times of overwhelming requests, calls are longer and that results in longer waiting times. Some companies saw hold times balloon by 34%.

With solutions like Service Cloud, it’s possible to let your customers know the estimated wait time for this particular call. It’s good to have at least some certainty in the uncertain times.

Staying connected in isolation

Behind every great customer service stand amazing people. Let’s not forget about supporting the customer support reps on every stage of their work.

Without the usual office infrastructure or their reliable support peers usually sitting next to them, agents may struggle with a timely response to the requests  —  some companies report escalations to other departments to skyrocket by more than 65%.

With Omni-Channel presence and routing, it’s possible to automatically route cases to agents who are most skilled in a certain topic or who are available at the moment. Alternatively Chatter or other messaging tools that integrate with Salesforce easily connect customer-facing agents with other employees that can bring help quickly on the go from any device.

What other challenges is your customer service currently facing? Let us know and see how we can help.