Customer Service Insights from Gladly Connect 2022
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In May, leading ecommerce brands gathered for Gladly Connect 2022, a virtual conference exploring radically personal customer service and proven best practices for unlocking the most value from customer service teams. Attendees heard from leading retailers and executive members of the Gladly team as they walked through exciting developments that map a bright future for the world of support-driven ecommerce.
If you weren’t able to attend, we’ve recapped some of the conference’s key takeaways, trends, and customer service insights. From opening future revenue opportunities to understanding better staffing practices, these new insights will help your ecommerce brand take charge in 2022 and beyond with a cutting-edge approach to attracting and retaining valuable shoppers through great customer service.
Loyalty Is Your Biggest Breadwinner
Growing brands want lots of new customers. But throwing money at new user acquisition swiftly causes diminishing returns, meaning ecommerce companies need to start thinking more creatively. The new era of customer expectations is all about driving loyalty. For that, brands need their support teams to lead the charge.
Let’s start with the economic benefits. The global research group Brand Keys noted recently that a lift as small as 5% in customer loyalty translated to lifetime value increases of over 76%, showing the immense underlying worth of investing in keeping customers happy. This correlates with the latest Gladly customer expectations report, which found that 72% of customers will pay more for a great service experience. Clearly, there’s a value correlation between building customer experience and expanding long-term revenue possibilities.
But there’s more to the story, as Gladly CEO Joseph Ansanelli pointed out in his keynote.“At Gladly, we really believe that customer loyalty is the foundation to building enduring value. But the reality is that loyalty is very fragile.” In fact, our research has found that it only takes two bad customer service experiences to lose a customer for life. Customer loyalty is an asset worth investing in, and the work starts with customer experience.
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Helping Customers Help Themselves
The more automation and AI become involved in developing customer support, the more powerful and central self-service will be to the process. “As long as you make it really easy, and not like you’re deflecting them. You don’t want to deflect customers. You want to give them choices,” Ansanelli said.
Good self-service is essential for scaling high-quality customer experience and, by default, a powerful loyalty driver. The more ecommerce brands can create self-service options that are wise to customer behaviors, personalized to their issues, and designed to help them find solutions on their own, the more customers will trust and return to those brands.
Think about the most common customer question that support heroes deal with, “where is my order?” Ticket-based systems don’t show clear customer history. Instead, people-driven support platforms seek to know the customer inside and out through purchase and conversational history, providing more leeway for self-service to complete the request.
Making Your Heroes a Customer’s Best Friend
Your support team is the frontline of your brand’s customer experience, and the more empowered they are to connect with customers, the more they can succeed. Beyond just order information, enable your team to take action on a customer’s behalf to really turn your agents into heroes.
This is where technology and knowledge bases become customer experience gamechangers. Support heroes are the manifestation of loyalty-based revenue, and when they are set up to go above and beyond, your bottom line will see the results.
With events like Gladly Connect, more people are coming together to promote the value of customer experience that leads with support. These essential takeaways and customer service insights are indicators of the ecommerce world’s potential.
About Gladly
Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies that want to maximize the lifetime value of their customers. Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or case to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered around people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more revenue.
The world’s most innovative consumer companies like Godiva, JOANN, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences.
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