Welcome back to your monthly dose of insights into customer support automation from your friends at Ultimate!
In this month’s edition:
Times are tough for customer support leaders thanks to the looming recession. Customer expectations are high and budgets are low.
You might think this has caused companies to scale back on customer service spending, but according to a poll conducted by Gartner, the opposite is true. Only 7% of CFOs plan to decrease customer service spending over the next 12 months. Despite economic pressures, 72% plan to maintain spending and 21% actually plan to increase customer spending.
Whew.
But if you want to double-down on future-proofing your support team, now’s the time to improve, automate, or eliminate inefficient processes. And if you are proposing spending money, make it on technologies that reduce costs — like digital self-service channels that ring in at $0.09 per contact compared to $14 per contact in assisted service.
Read more advice for mitigating the effects of the economic downturn in the full article.
Speaking of mitigating the effects of the current economic situation… We spoke to author and CX expert Shep Hyken about how brands can go about balancing efficiency with exceptional CX to not only weather the storm, but emerge stronger than before.
Shep’s top tips?
Introducing a new segment where, each month, we’ll feature a leader in the CS and AI community.
First up: a trending post on LinkedIn from Hosam Hassan, customer support automation expert and Zendesk consultant. He discusses interviewing Madison Hoffman, Director of Chatbot Operations at Zendesk, about how self-service support streamlines CX. Sounds like a match made in SaaS heaven.
The situation: Leading music streaming service Deezer needed a cost-effective way to deal with a high volume of requests from their global customer base.
The business case for automation:
The success in numbers: Deezer now offers 24/7 support in 7 languages, saving 200 agent hours per week, which adds up to €155,000 saved annually.
“Ultimate is doing the work of approximately 5 agents’ worth of headcount. So that’s pretty valuable to us.”
- Patrick Dunford, Head of Customer Care, Deezer
Out-of-the-box or bespoke? No-code or low-code? Choosing the right tech stack for your business can be confusing and time-consuming.
That’s why, this month at The Ultimate Customer Support Academy, you’re enrolled in Intro to Customer Service Technology. In this interactive module, you’ll explore the different types of customer service technology available on the market and learn how to choose the right tech setup to deliver joyful customer experiences.