Customer service is about to change. It’s no secret that many businesses are struggling to provide a satisfactory customer experience. While some companies are still trying to keep up with this demand for instant communication, others have already taken an innovative approach in finding new ways to provide support and have already started seeing the benefits of doing so.

With the shifting economy and major changes across businesses in the last year, the customer service function is evolving more than ever before. But there is one thing that no matter how big or small your organization, needs to be a key element in your overall CX strategy.

So what should all customer service leaders be doing in 2023?

The most important thing to do for customer service and support in 2023 is to understand your customers. You can’t support them if you don’t know who they are, what they want, and what problems they’re having.

That’s why you need to be measuring, analyzing, and delivering strategies based on your customer data and analytics. In a Gartner online survey of 283 customer service and support leaders from August-October 2022, 84% of customer service and service support leaders cited customer data and analytics as “very or extremely important” for achieving their organizational goals in 2023.

Here’s what businesses need to focus on:

  • Customer data: The right data is key to understanding your customers. You need a comprehensive view of how users engage with both your company and its products or services throughout the entire lifecycle of these interactions.
  • Customer analytics: Use this information to gain insights into how customers behave when interacting with you; this will help guide product development, improve sales processes, and enhance customer experience (CX). It will also enable smarter marketing campaigns that target specific segments based on their needs rather than just demographic characteristics like age or gender alone.”

What’s next?

During challenging financial times, executives in customer service and support roles are tasked with finding creative solutions for reducing costs. In order to remain competitive, companies are turning their attention toward digital channels and solutions in an effort to reduce costs without compromising customer experience or having to cut staff.

Customer service and support leaders plan to devote more resources to improving, automating or eliminating inefficient processes (59%), migrating service volume to digital and self-service channels (51%) and contributing to the top-line by creating customer value (46%) in the near future.

With these survey findings in mind, Gartner experts recommend customer service and support leaders:

  • Collect actionable customer data across channels through a robust Voice of Customer (VoC) program that goes beyond surveys and incorporates more advanced methods such as speech, text and digital experience analytics to help guide decisions on personnel, processes and technologies;
  • Build digital self-service teams to oversee the digital channel strategy, manage channels and work closely with data analysts to develop and measure success metrics; and
  • Enable customer service agents with technology, such as connected desktops, to help them better guide customers through resolution.

Guesswork has no place in the modern business world. Everyone is different in their own way and the acquisition and leverage of data is one of the most accurate ways for professionals all over the world to serve an increasingly diverse clientele.

Make good use of the data that you gather from your customers and you will start to see your satisfaction score skyrocket.