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Create a Customer Support Experience That Works for Your Customers and Your Team

 By Bobby Stapleton, Director, Customer Support at Intercom

The customer support industry is at a critical tipping point. With the majority of a company’s customer interactions now happening online, providing fast and personal customer support is more critical than ever. The rules are being rewritten, and businesses need to embrace change fast–or risk losing valued customers and talented teammates.

At Intercom, we've seen this both in our own customer support team and with our customers, who are looking for new ways to tackle increasing customer expectations and more complex support queries. We recently surveyed over 1,200 global support leaders on the rapidly evolving customer support landscape and found teams are facing more pressure than ever to deliver great support amidst remote working and distributed teams.

Key stats from Intercom Customer Support Trends Report show:  

•  64% of customer support leaders say their teams have felt burned out in the past year
•  59% of organizations say their incoming support volume has increased over the past year
•  75% of support leaders say their teams have seen customer expectations increase, but only 34% are confident they can meet those expectations
•  73% of customer support teams say that empathizing with customers is a top priority, but 21% don’t feel they have the tools they need to enable appropriate empathy  

The message is clear: now is the time to adapt and future-proof your customer support tools, strategy, and processes. This is critical to meet and exceed the needs of modern customers, and help your team flourish now and in the future. But where do you start? Consider this five-step checklist:  

1. Leverage technology, like automated workflows, to supercharge your team’s efficiency
2. Lean on chatbots to resolve simple, repetitive queries; free up your team for high-priority issues
3. Personalize all of your communication with customers
4. Support and invest in your team with training, career development and wellness programs
5. Consolidate your tech stack and embrace an all-in-one customer communications platform  

Ultimately, it’s the businesses who embrace change and update their tools, strategy, and mindset that will attract, engage, and retain customers for years to come.                           

Intercom’s Customer Support Trends Report 2021 can be downloaded here. Bobby Stapleton is Director of Customer Support at Intercom. Bobby joined Intercom in 2018 and leads a team of customer support leaders in Chicago, San Francisco and Dublin. Bobby has helped evolve Intercom’s support processes and systems and continues to scale the customer experience alongside Intercom's growth upmarket.