The customer service industry is continually evolving. It seems like every day there’s a new social media platform your agents need to adopt to stay relevant to your customers. The good news is, one thing hasn’t changed: People still prefer a phone call over any other customer support channel. (Yes, even millennials.) If you want to win over your customers for life, you need to offer exceptional over-the-phone customer support.

The customer service requests your agents field have something valuable to tell you about your customers, product, and business. More than that, the cumulative data produced by your customer service tickets can reveal key insights. But for your business to learn from the information included within all those requests, you need a good method for tracking and analyzing them.

We’ve all heard the stories of companies going above and beyond to provide their customers with incredible support: Some of these stories are heart-warming. Some are inspiring. And some garnered good PR and attention on social media. One thing they all have in common, though: None of them is scalable. No restaurant could afford to deliver an airport steak to its entire customer base. And while giraffe bread hit the mark, it wouldn't be advisable for companies to take every branding suggestion.

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

Any type of career a person chooses will require developing a relevant skill set. Sometimes it’s largely a matter of gaining a pertinent body of knowledge—doctors need to learn as much about the health and medical fields as possible, for instance. People who choose to work in customer-facing roles have to learn a set of skills that are as much about honing personality traits as learning facts. Working with customers can be immensely rewarding for people who enjoy helping others.

When someone tells you they spent hours on the phone with customer service, it’s usually a horror story. We all know the tropes of the genre—torturously long waits, endless transfers, inescapable hold music... But at Zendesk, some of our support agents take pride in their longest customer calls.

High performing customer experience teams are more than twice as likely as underperforming teams to be taking an omnichannel approach, according to Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report, 2020. Yet Zendesk findings also revealed that only 35 percent of Benchmark companies have an omnichannel strategy in place. This gap represents a sweet spot where businesses can rise above their competition and differentiate on the basis of customer experience.

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase customer value? You might think about money—giving customers a good price for a quality product. And 20 years ago, you’d have been right. But today, customer value encompasses much more. Today’s buyers don’t just care about a product’s price or even its quality. They also prioritize brand experiences.

A contact center and a call center are essentially the same thing, right? Well, yes and no. Call centers only field phone calls, whereas a contact center offers a variety of other ways for customers to reach out for support: email, chat, self-service, messaging apps, and social media. Why is it important to understand the difference? While a call center might work for your business, chances are your customers will be better served via a contact center.

People don’t generally open their wallets to spend money without getting something in return. Even when making a donation, there’s an incentive like feeling good or connecting to a cause. To be successful, businesses need to tap into unmet customer needs and offer solutions. Sounds simple — but how do you actually find out what’s on your customers’ minds?

This year we’ve seen an unexpected acceleration of cloud and software companies, driven by the sudden shift to remote work. In particular, business-to-business (B2B) software is “having a moment,” and the trend seems likely to continue. In this context, the announcement of this year’s Forbes Cloud 100 List takes on a new significance.

Customer reviews have become a key step in the customer journey, with a whopping 95 percent of customers reading reviews before making a purchase decision. Customers always had the power to recommend (or discredit) a brand to their friends or family. But being constantly connected has given them greater ability to influence many other customers' buying decisions as well, whether they’re posting a Tweet or writing a Yelp review.

As we continue to navigate the impacts of COVID-19, businesses and customers alike are recognizing that knowledge is power. Information, resources and instructions—the kind of knowledge typically provided on company help centers and FAQ pages—can help keep the world moving even when so much remains unknown. The only thing we know for sure is that the world will keep changing, and no matter what happens, you’ll need to keep your customers informed.

When choosing a customer service solution, there are many factors to consider, and let’s face it — cost is high among them. Freshdesk says you’re saving money on their low license costs, which is a part of the total cost of ownership, but there are big trade offs to know about. Here are the top three things you should consider.

Building a great product isn’t enough to stand out in the market. What you need is a compelling message—one that speaks to your audience and is unique to your brand. How do you make sure you’re telling the same story to every customer across every touchpoint? One key tactic is writing a positioning statement.

You've put in the work to build an excellent call center. You've hired for the right skills, given everyone the best possible training, started tracking your performance, and you've even created a wonderful workplace where your agents can work and collaborate. Then 2020 happened. The COVID-19 pandemic closed offices and sent employees home. As the days away from the office added up, returning to "business as usual" in your call center anytime soon seemed less and less likely.

It’s easy to think the hard work ends once you’ve landed a customer. In reality, the struggle to win your clients’ hearts is only just beginning. After you make a sale, your business needs to keep showing the customer that your product is valuable. Whether you succeed or not comes down to the team you have promoting your products and growing the customer relationship. That’s where a customer success manager comes in.

How well is your call center handling customer issues? Metrics like customer survey scores and average hold times speak volumes about your support team’s performance. But even data doesn’t always tell you the full story. To uncover the finer details of your call center performance, you’ll need a headset and a quick tutorial on call listening, or call monitoring.

Have you ever asked someone for their phone number but then stressed about that first call? It can be daunting to pick up the phone and call a stranger, but it’s the only way to get to know someone. Discovery calls are the same way—somewhat daunting, but critical to building relationships with leads. They’re your chance to get to know the prospect and introduce them to your business.

We get it. Running a call center is hard. Between the endless inbound calls and technical hiccups, managing a call center tests your patience and persistence. The good news is you can make things easier on yourself with a call center software solution: CCaaS. By 2022, contact center as a service (CCaaS) software will account for roughly 50% of preferred adoption models in contact centers.

A lot has changed since our initial COVID-19 update, but we still feel strongly that in order to make it through this crisis and keep our business moving forward, we need to prioritize the wellbeing of our customers, our employees and our communities. We remain committed to keeping our customers at the center of everything we do. That includes investing in both our products and our people.

Every startup dreams of making it big, but even now with so many examples, it’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly gives a unicorn its horn, so to speak. That’s why we decided to study startups, including some who went on to become unicorns. For our Startups CX Benchmark Report 2020, we examined over 4,000 startups to determine whether there was a connection between startup growth and customer experience (CX) investment. Spoiler alert: there was.

When’s the last time you called a major corporation and hung up, thinking, “Wow, what amazing customer service!” Mature enterprise companies often struggle to meet customer expectations. They’re often slow to integrate their customer service software with new support channels and integrations. Partially, this is because legacy brands still rely on the traditional methods they were founded upon.