And by maps, I mean the blog post below...

With over seventy-two trillion messages sent in 2018 across messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, it’s no surprise that 68% of consumers choose messaging as their preferred way to communicate with businesses. Customers are growing more comfortable with sending a message to a business just like they would to their friends and families—it brings an extra degree of convenience and familiarity to the customer experience.

Have you ever overheard people having heated discussions about the differences between help desks, service desks, and IT service management (ITSM)? Surprisingly, we have. Some argue that help desk is an outdated term referring to an IT-centric support capability born in the late 1980s (think mainframes), with little attention to the end user. They may say service desk was coined to describe a new focus on serving end-users in a timely manner.

Keeping an eye on your day-to-day customer service operations means measuring the right metrics—that is, knowing which ones are setting your business up for both immediate and long-term success. Whether your company’s customer service is used as a means to drive overall revenue or is focused on helping customers fully understand your products or services, the tracked metrics should pertain to specific strategies designed to achieve your company’s overall goals.

Today’s companies understand how customer service plays a critical role in their efforts to be “customer-centric”—it’s why many of them invest heavily in the various functions of customer support. By adding an element of customer-centricity to different facets of a business, these companies are changing what a customer service job can be.

It can be a real struggle to create experiences that meet customer expectations. In today’s world, new apps and channels have made it easier than ever to interact with a company’s brand across platforms and devices. This has generated a never-ending stream of customer data that’s disconnected, especially when building apps that enhance the customer experience.

They also bring lousy headlines. Hey, they can’t all be hits.

As consumers’ preferred channel for solving simple queries, self-service can play a huge role in helping businesses scale in a customer-centric way. Take it from Freshly. Founded in 2015, the meal delivery subscription service brings nutrient-rich, chef-cooked meals right to customers’ doors, eliminating the confusion around (or lack of interest in) recipes or evening grocery store runs.

Sometimes even the most experienced agents will face a customer service issue so complex that it leaves them stumped. That’s understandable—after all, as the technology driving many products and services becomes increasingly complicated, the need for guidance from experts on other teams has become commonplace.

Defining good customer service can seem to be a bit of a moving target, especially in this era of ever-increasing customer expectations. But the forward-thinking companies leading the charge in this new reality—such as Zendesk strategic partners Guru, Lessonly, and Stella Connect—are keenly aware that it’s their customers who get to make that determination, not them.