Zendesk CX trends 2023 report:
How SweetHawk can help you break down silos and leverage sentiment.
The latest Zendesk CX trends report for 2023 has been released and its filled with valuable information. In this article, we will delve into four areas of the report's findings and discuss how SweetHawk apps can be utilised to take advantage of these trends.
Let’s start with first response time. This metric measures the amount of time it takes a business to initially get back to a customer and is one of the key factors in procuring great customer satisfaction. But last year's data showed a surprising overall 11% increase in first response times across all industries*. This is a cause for concern, especially when considering the fact that a negative experience with a company often results in the loss of a customer.
According to the report, a staggering 73% of consumers will switch to a rival company after multiple unsatisfactory experiences*, and over 50% will leave after just one*! Notably, the report also found that only 40% of businesses see customer support as a revenue generator*. These stats seem a little at odds with each other. Nonetheless, there are indications that the tides are turning. 80% of businesses indicated that they want to turn their support departments into recognised revenue drivers as opposed to viewing them as mere cost centres*.
So the big challenge is how to improve customer experience (CX) to retain customers and attract new ones.
1. Breaking down silos.
When data and teams are siloed in a business it can result in inconsistent and inaccurate information being shared across the organization, inefficient workflows, slow decision-making processes, confusion and miscommunication. Additionally, when teams are not working together and sharing information, they may miss out on opportunities to improve processes, develop new products, or solve problems in creative ways. Meanwhile 70% of consumers expect anyone they interact with within an organisation to have full context about what they’re contacting them for*.
So the first step suggested in the report to help break down these silos is to move everyone in your business onto the one CX platform, like Zendesk. But if this isn't entirely possible then using mature integrations into other platforms like Slack, Jira or MS Teams can also help. One workflow suggested was around using the integration with Shopify to enable your CX team to do refunds without having to either swivel chair to another platform, or worse still, ask another department to perform the task.
Additionally SweetHawk has several apps that can assist here too.
Firstly the Tasks & Sub-tickets app allows you to maintain your initial conversation with the customer, but if conversations with other departments, contractors or 3rd parties are required, sub-tickets can be generated. The status of each of those sub-tickets can easily be seen from within the original ticket. For customer issues that have a predefined path across the business, you can even have the tasks and sub-tickets automatically generated and assigned out which translates to large time savings and an overall faster resolution time for the customer.
Next the SweetHawk Approve app breaks down silos because it allows you to have approvals completed by anyone, no matter if they’re a Zendesk agent or not. All an approver needs is access to their email and the appropriate data can be sent to them as part of a flow, either manually entered and sent by the Zendesk agent, or automatically the instant an end user submits a query.
Another app in this category is the Calendar app. This allows you to have an unlimited number of calendars inside of Zendesk and sync them up to either Google Calendar or Office365. Agents are even able to hook-up their personal calendars. This allows for team transparency and faster access to data enabling agents to make informed decisions on scheduling quicker.
Finally, the SweetHawk Notify app is also helping to break down silos as it allows you to send pop up notifications to specific sets of agents based on any ticket event. Those notifications are received inside the agents Zendesk interface so there is no need for them to swivel chair to different apps like slack or Teams, only to have to come back into Zendesk to action them.
2. Customer sentiment is reshaping CX.
We’ve already talked about how important satisfied customers are… or more accurately, how important it is to not have dissatisfied customers. However, according to the report, alarmingly only 14% of businesses that are using NPS (Net Promoter Score is a popular metric used to gauge how satisfied customers are with your company) and only 29% of businesses that are measuring customer sentiment are using this data to personalise the customer experience*.
That’s a lot of businesses with their head stuck in the sand. In order to be able to maintain and improve how happy your customers are, you have to measure it yes, but then you have to do something with that data too.
This is where SweetHawk’s Survey app can help. The survey app allows you to ask the customer 0-10 questions about both how they feel about the support they received and asks them to fill in a transactional NPS rating.
Those scores are then fed into the Zendesk ticket data such as tags and numeric fields. This allows you to build workflows based on the scores submitted. You can then use apps like Notify to automatically alert specific team members (eg. if a bad response was received) as popup notifications inside of Zendesk (no need to swivel chair to email or a different platform).
3. AI is on the march, so pay attention.
The buzz around AI is at an all-time high, particularly with the popularity of ChatGPT. The incident where Google lost $100 billion** after their AI product provided an incorrect answer only reinforces the high expectations placed on this field. Based on our observations, this is also something that Zendesk seems to be investing heavily into.
Zendesk’s report tells us that in CX, the best use of AI remains around routing and sentiment analysis. However, it also states that while 72% of consumers have noticed marked improvements in AI quality, 78% of consumers who interact with AI find themselves ending up needing to talk with a human agent anyway*.
So while things are quite there yet, the landscape is changing fast, so keep your eyes on this space. Zendesk’s current offering allows you to combine bots within their Flow Builder to present customers with the right information quickly. Customers who are using Flow Builder with bots have reported an improvement in resolution times by up to 21%.
4. Flexible conversations make customers happy.
Flexible conversations means that customers can reach out to a business and interact on their terms. For example, this might mean the customer starts a conversation with your organisation in Facebook, then later they switch to email and then later still move to a phone conversation. All the while through, the agents speaking to them have full visibility into everything that was said in the other channels. Additionally, according to the report, 72% of customers want immediate service*. But you might be asking yourself how to make that happen in the real world. This is where Zendesk Messaging combined with Sunshine Conversations comes in. It enables you to meet the customer via any channel with immediate responses through bots and Flow Builder. Here’s a short video by Zendesk on how the basic version of Zendesk Messaging and Flow Builder works.
* Source: https://cxtrends.zendesk.com/