Last week, Gartner published the results of their survey on customer service support priorities for 2022. According to the research, 64% of customer service and support leaders named ‘grow the business’ as their most critical priority in the upcoming year.
Besides business growth, there are three other aspects customer service professionals will consider when planning their investments for 2022. As a team always excited about new insights and predictions, we gathered the most interesting messages from the report.
Investing in value enhancement strategies
Between August and September 2021, Garner surveyed 170 customer service and support leaders to get reliable information on the further developments of the customer service industry.
According to the results extracted, 82% of organizations either have or plan to implement a value enhancement strategy in the future. To help companies understand where to focus when planning such change, Gartner identified two approaches that organizations pursuing such value enhancement strategies should follow:
1. Looking for patterns throughout the customer base to find groups that expect added value.
2. Mining customer data to flag individual customers in need of more value.
‘Adding value in customer service interactions can lead to new revenue streams while also protecting existing ones. As a result, strategies that focus on enhancing value are prevalent and growing,’
explained Brad Fager, research director in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice
Building better knowledge management systems
In line with the above stated, to build value enhancement strategies, leaders will have to invest in an effective knowledge management system and encourage employees through various learning options.
The research further indicates that customer-facing employees encounter heightened role demands and this has elevated the knowledge requirements for success. Additionally, most of them operate in a remote setting where a strong knowledge source has become scarcer. Therefore, service leaders will focus less on operating a remote workforce in favour of more effective knowledge management systems that enable productive rep workflows.
‘To foster effective knowledge management practices, customer service and support leaders should prioritize people and process ahead of decisions on a tech solution, especially in the early stages of building knowledge management,’ commented Fager.
Self-service channels remain a top focus in 2022
The research confirms that the basics of self-service adoption will remain the greatest focus for service and support professionals. An interesting insight from the report is that in 2022, self-service strategies should enhance the holistic customer journeys that start on search engines and organization websites.
Optimizing the customer site navigation and transitions across channels, for instance, is an untapped opportunity for customer service. Leaders can design a site navigation experience that guides customers toward self-service solutions while introducing assistance along the customer journey.