Article originally published in the Altfi report, jointly sponsored by Zendesk. The landscape of customer service has never looked more different, shaped by shifting consumer behaviour and expectations that have rapidly changed over the past two years, driven in turn by the shocks and aftershocks of the pandemic, economic uncertainties, and ever evolving technology trends. Consumers’ voices are growing louder, and bolder, and what customers want is clear: immersive customer experiences.

Take a moment and think about your latest purchasing experiences. Can you recall buying a product impulsively because of excitement? Or can you remember leaving a store because of a bad experience? What was the main driver of your decisions? Harvard Business Study shows that ninety-five per cent of purchase decisions are emotional. The traditional Customer Experience (CX) metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES only measure loyalty, service quality, and functionality.

Customer experience is now shaping the way companies across the world do business. We’ve seen companies thrive based on their ability to listen to their customers’ needs and keep up with the latest trends. The latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) provide a bounty of opportunities and possibilities for businesses to rise to the challenge, and deliver seamless, personalised, and immersive experiences for their consumers.

With how fast industries move, technologies advance and current events shift, organisational change is now a normal part of doing business. But change is rarely easy. And the bigger and more complex a business is, the more challenging it is to implement change effectively. Yet the ability to incorporate necessary changes into how you do business plays a direct role in long-term success.

It’s great to be able to put a ticket on hold but I’m sure you’ve suffered when tickets have stayed like that for too long. Sure, you could create an automation to change the state back to being open after X amount of days but life is never as simple as there being a constant value for X. And perhaps you don’t want to actually change the status – you just want to be reminded that the ticket is there.

If you have a large support team, it can be difficult to maintain complex workflows. In an ideal world, your team would easily distribute tickets to the people who know how to handle them best – with no time lost unnecessarily bouncing support tickets between different agents or departments. Without the right tools, teams have to use cumbersome and costly workarounds to route tickets to the right places.

A comprehensive knowledge base is an essential piece of any 21st-century support operation. But implementing it is just the first step – maintenance comes next. The best way to maintain your knowledge base is by harvesting support agents’ collective knowledge – but they’re often swamped and enabling their contributions can be a huge operational hurdle. Fortunately, you can easily capture content using the Zendesk Knowledge Capture app, which helps agents in three key ways.

Manufacturers are taking the ‘glass half full’ approach to forecasting their performance for the next couple of years. Specifically, they are viewing CX as a potentially profitable tool as they look to overcome what has been a difficult period of supply chain disruption and rising costs. The rationale is that if they can continue to delight customers, it will help them stand out from a crowd of competitors.

As a result of today’s macroeconomic climate, software companies are looking for ways to control costs, accelerate net retention and drive profitable growth. This requires a focus on building customer loyalty through differentiated CX. And agents play a critical role, but many are struggling to keep up with evolving customer expectations. Learn how a tiered approach to customer service can increase customer satisfaction and keep operating costs in check.

It’s fair to say the manufacturing industry is on the fast track to digital transformation. The pandemic exposed the fragility of our global supply chains, resulting in empty shelves and overstocked warehouses. Meanwhile, as the pandemic subsides, inflation is driving up the cost of goods and logistics, putting the squeeze on companies still recovering from the past few years. So it’s no surprise that manufacturers are looking for ways to cut costs whilst still maintaining quality.