customer engagement & experience.

Technology continues to change how customer engagement and customer experience jobs are done. Meanwhile, as online orders surge, those same professionals must also contend with more requests for customer support. Find out why these shifts and more are creating a need for new skills for customer-facing support personnel, why the function's retention problem isn't likely to go away anytime soon and more trends that will define the profession in 2023. And while you're at it, see salaries for dozens of today's most in-demand customer engagement and customer experience jobs.

Surge in online order volume during COVID-19 placed a huge burden on customer service teams. But even as lockdowns waned and society reopened, ongoing supply chain challenges remained — and they’re here to stay for the foreseeable future. Customer satisfaction is at the lowest it’s been in nearly 15 years. Employers will need to step up talent attraction and retention efforts to adequately staff contact centers to handle increased queries.

Perhaps as a response to these challenges, customer service is experiencing, at least in part, a shift away from almost exclusively contract roles, and toward more direct hires. Likewise, traditional customer service positions were almost always onsite, but more organizations are leveraging remote or hybrid approaches to customer service. Lastly, as a direct result of customer service’s sky-high turnover rate over the last few years, there were more than 700,000 total job postings for customer service reps in the last 12 months. The sheer demand for these customer-facing professionals has caused many organizations to rethink what had typically been a junior or even entry-level position. Today, we’re seeing more and more organizations hiring more experienced professionals for the role — and many of these organizations are happy to pay top dollar to do so.

Employees who interact with clients have a huge impact on the overall customer experience, yet employers are having difficulty providing adequate training to ensure that goal.

• Forty-six percent of employees say they are not as skilled as they need to be in order to continue their careers.
• Twenty-nine percent don’t feel optimistic about the opportunities they have for training, upskilling or learning new skills in general.

As new tech continues to be added, and the role of the customer service specialist evolves, employers are finding it hard to keep up with training. Plus, with turnover near record highs, employers are having to devote more time and resources to the task. That means not just more but better and more efficient training will be needed in 2023. The good news is that there are a plethora of online training platforms available today. Employers who feel overwhelmed with keeping up with the latest in-house training would do well to engage these external sources to keep their teams’ on track. Seventy-five percent of employee respondents to a 2022 Randstad survey said employer-provided reskilling and upskilling opportunities were very important to them. Prioritizing training will not only ensure your team can deliver the highest level of service, it can help you improve engagement and satisfaction, too — important sentiments to solidify during times of turnover and talent shortage.

As companies increase usage of digital and self-service channels, they must not forget about the critical human element. More than half of customers report frustration with automated systems. Leaders should focus on balancing the efficiency of automated systems with the personalized approach of live reps to succeed in 2023.

Digital assistants and A.I.-powered decision-making can undoubtedly save customer service teams valuable time and money, but over-reliance negates these gains. Leaders should look to define support channels more clearly to create the seamless, blended experience today’s customers crave. That means building out detailed (yet easy to follow) knowledge bases or using chatbots to address routine customer queries while making human representatives available to provide more tailored guidance. These so-called “super-agents” can specialize in individual subject areas to help pinpoint customer concerns more clearly, or in certain cases, provide personalized guidance for product or service selection.

Today’s customers want unified, omnichannel customer experiences. Successful organizations will be those that can provide seamless support across channels. This unified view is being mirrored internally as well: Revenue operations, an emerging discipline that unites marketing, sales and customer success together, has removed old silos and engaged the whole organization to think about customer strategy more holistically.

With customer data rising in prominence as a major value driver for companies today, customer sentiment must be accounted for in high-level business decision-making to protect the bottom line. Organizations that have adopted revenue operations successfully have been met with up to a 20 percent increase in customer satisfaction and 71 percent higher stock performance.

However, many are still struggling to achieve organizational optimization in this department, and are yet to extract full value from their revenue operations. As leaders look to build out their customer service departments with top talent this year, sourcing for candidates with the capabilities to aid in this new strategic function will be critical to gaining an edge.

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