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As technology advances, customer service is becoming increasingly complex. If you see from consumer perspective, customer service appears to be effortless across multiple channels.
But, if you see from the perspective of customer service representative or team, it is incredibly hard to manage customers. Help desk service providers have been providing businesses with a way to cut costs for years. However, the current technology trends in IT help desk are putting CEOs and CIOs at the forefront of planning.

Customer service is not a new thing. In fact, it has been around for decades. However, most of the organizations today are focusing more on serving customers in the best possible way by adding multiple avenues. Companies have special centers that manage customer issues effectively. As we all know, customer experience can make or break the brand. Therefore in today’s competitive scenario, aiding customers has got a great role to play. Despite of the challenges, customer support has continued to grow. As a result of which, customer service interactions will continue their transitions to digital channels.

Below are some of the technology trends that have popularized in the recent years and are expected to gain limelight in 2016 and beyond.

Self-Service Portals

Self-service portal is a form of cloud service where customer provision launches applications without going through external cloud service provider. With a good cloud-based portal, customers can get IT provisions on their own. Help desk service providers can give their customers a web-based interface that enables quick service for both IT and non-IT savvy customers. However, it is crucial that the self-service portals be user-friendly and easy to navigate.

Many providers offer cloud-based portals that cater different groups of customers. However, some vendors specialize in providing a single viewpoint and tend to cater the end users. Today, cloud portals are becoming so popular that, 55% of the companies are building them for their own data centers to access resources.

Quick and customized responses

With easily customizable help desk software, you can create customized roles of your customer support staff. You can make someone the powerful admin and have complete control over all the support processes. Using the best help desk solution, you can make it completely look like your company’s own help desk and give it your brand name.
A customizable help desk will listen to your every command. For example, if you want to assign tickets with more than 10 replies, you can do it easily with the help of the best help desk software. You can create your own rules, automate your help desk and let it function the way you want.

Consistent Service

Savvy organizations understand the role played by excellent customer service team. Companies understand that winning customer loyalty doesn’t happen overnight and building strong customer relationship needs consistent effort. Though pricing and quality of products is important, loyalty earned through delivering on promises and taking care of customers will often win the sale.
Customers usually understand that an occasional problem can be handled quickly. What they won’t tolerate is rudeness, negligence, inconsistency and unnecessary bureaucracy. The inability of customer service agents to provide solutions and solve customer queries is more annoying than the problem itself. It is the combination of right technology with right help desk agents that make a standout customer service.

In-house Vs. Offshore

More than 80% of the help desk centers are in-house operations. They are based on the premises that company employees can offer the best customer service. The in-house help desk agents have in-depth knowledge of the product and can solve customer queries easily with great accuracy. The rapid technological advancements have made offshore outsourcing much easier and reliable.
As a result of current technology trends, organizations are utilizing outsourced contact centers that offer start-of-art software, great flexibility and technological innovation at lower operational costs. In-house contact centers are investing heavily in training their employees to improve quality of service and customer experience.

Notifications and text messages for communication

The key to a successful customer support is communication. Today, customers are more delighted to get messages for payment reminders, ticket status, appointments, reservations, special offers, promotions and other things. In today’s scenario, business-to-consumer communication through text messages is very popular. If you want instant message delivery and engage the customers proactively, texting is a convenient way to deliver message. Moreover, it matches the busy lifestyle if customers perfectly.
Help desk software will enable you to notify your customers via SMS and notifications. For example – when your customer raises a ticket or adds new service request, he would be acknowledged by a notification. Moreover, your help desk agent will also be notified automatically when a ticket has been assigned to him/her. As the notifications have been in the form of text messages, they would never take a miss.

To maintain sustainable growth pattern, it is must to raise the bar of customer service. These days, customer expectations are tremendous and companies should strive hard to meet their expectations. Your business will flourish, if your customers are happy and satisfied.