Report presents insights about: Impact of customer experience on brand loyalty • Top expectations and desires of customers and agents • Biggest challenges leaders face • Role of AI, including generative AI, in customer service— now and in the future
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GLO1st edition of the Customer Experience Trends report, ServiceNow commissioned a survey of nearly 6,400 customers, agents, and leaders across more than nine countries and regions and more than a dozen industries. We wanted to learn about perceptions on the state of customer service.
Report presents insights about:
- Impact of customer experience on brand loyalty
- Top expectations and desires of customers and agents
- Biggest challenges leaders face
- Role of AI, including generative AI, in customer service— now and in the future
Key Takeaways:
1. Customers feel disconnected and discontented: Customer expectations for great service experiences have only increased, which means getting it right has never been more important. While customers are often presented with a multitude of options to resolve an issue themselves, sometimes what they really want—or need—is a live human connection. But in an era when resources are thin and budgets are tight, reaching a live agent is an issue in and of itself. 44% of customers say their biggest issue is the inability to reach a live customer service agent quickly and efficiently.
2. Customer service agents are overburdened: Despite investments in self-service, chatbots, and other customer engagement capabilities, live agents are still the backbone of customer service—and their job has never been harder. Complexity persists across the front, middle, and back offices, and agents continue to be the glue that holds these disparate areas together. 44% of agents say their biggest challenges are difficulty communicating with other departments and delays resolving customer issues.
3. Customer experience leaders are under pressure: Today’s leaders are urged to deliver great customer experiences while reducing costs. This is no small undertaking when they’re also balancing the competing demands of customer requests, agent needs, and bottom-line business requirements. While most organizations have deployed workforce optimization and integrated with systems of record, leaders acknowledge that their agents continue to carry a heavy burden and, in fact, now tackle more cases rather than fewer.
23% of leaders indicated a lack of resources/capacity is their biggest challenge as they struggle to address the increased volume of cases
4. AI and GenAI are delivering real value in customer service: Given the lack of resources, capacity, and agent availability, customer experience leaders have increasingly turned to AI, and now to generative AI, as vital capabilities for improving all facets of the customer service process. Leaders say AI is the No. 1 capability for reducing costs, case volume, and resolution time. And their AI investments—in chatbots, sentiment analysis, recommended knowledge articles, and more—are paying off. 27% of leaders say AI is the capability providing the greatest reduction in customer effort
5. Next steps in the future of customer experience: Customer expectations have already risen to new heights in the past three years, and leaders predict they will go even higher over the next three. Customers will demand faster resolutions, higher quality of service across channels, and improved ability to resolve issues on first contact. As leaders plan and build new capabilities, they are seeking the advantages that system intelligence and automation can provide, such as increased service efficiency and quality with an eye toward agent performance.. 78% of leaders view workforce optimization as the most important capability to deploy in the next three years.
Methodology: Data in this report was gathered in a survey of 4,242 B2B and B2C customers and 2,157 leaders and agents from July 12 to August 8, 2023.1 Respondents varied across industry, age, role, and job title and were located in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Nordic region, the UK, and the U.S.
Read full report here.
Source: Servicenow.
