GoodFirms, globally renowned research, ratings, and reviews platform, recently released its new research report-“Global Customer Care Industry: Trends, Consumer Shifts, and Challenges.” This survey from GoodFirms on the global customer care industry tries to analyze and examine the market dynamics, the growth enablers, restraints, and trends set to shape the future customer care market.
The study highlights how the customer care industry is evolving in terms of service activities, and infrastructure to reduce the growing costs, increase the level of customer satisfaction, and add value to the brand. The research attempts to help consumers and customer services professionals get valuable insights to enhance the currently adopted customer care practices, and to expand the business growth further.
GoodFirms’ research reveals a few notable consumer trends, such as the most preferred channels to connect with customer care and support. Here the survey statistics unveil that 25.9% of surveyees prefer phones, 22.2% use live chat, 10.1% choose to email, 11% pick self-services tools, and 17.4% plump for virtual assistants. About 29.6% of customers conduct secondary research on the internet and user manuals to fix minor issues.
Omnichannel customer support, video chat assistance, more feedback and recommendation options are the top changes consumers expect to receive in customer service support.
The study identifies factors such as the pandemic and rise of new platforms that are causing major consumer shifts. 55.6% surveyees reported that customer care services have worsened after the pandemic.
70.4% of respondents shifted to alternate brands due to poor customer care service of the existing brands.
Further, the research discloses the significant challenges in the customer care industry, such as tackling customer disengagement, the rising cost of customer support practices and maintenance tools, dealing with demanding customers/managing expectations, staying conversant with new technologies and trends, inadequate training and poor knowledge among representatives, lack of standard procedures, taking too much time for resolutions, etc.
GoodFirms iterates that with the economic recovery in sight, the worldwide customer care industry is expected to flourish consistently. Businesses can drastically improve their growth by handling the challenges through digital innovations in customer support processes and partnering with experts in customer care services.
The research concludes that businesses need to adopt systematic practices to build long-lasting relationships with consumers, improve their products, and increase customer loyalty.
Key Findings:
- Phone is the most preferred method to connect with customer care.
- 48.1% of consumers are expecting more feedback and recommendation options, a recent popular trend.
- Responsive customer support and digital platforms are currently leading in customer care trends.
- E-commerce, food delivery, and travel segments are popular among the masses due to their best customer service.
- Personalized customer experience is also dominating the global customer care industry at present.
- Customers’ habits and preferences rapidly change, leading to several consumer shifts.
- The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened customer care as per 55.6% of respondents.
- 48.1% of surveyees recommend their preferred brands to others if their customer care is satisfactory.
- Handling rising customer care processes and tools costs is an important challenge in the customer care industry.
- Businesses prefer in-house customer care teams compared to outsourcing.
- The customer care industry is also experiencing issues handling demanding customers and newer technologies.
- 37% of respondents find it challenging to interact with customer care executives due to poor or irrelevant knowledge of the representatives.
- 40.4% of surveyees would like to see clear goals of executives in serving customers instead of spamming.
- Lack of time and coordination among customers and representatives is another major challenge impacting the industry.
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