Here are the newest integrations from Zendesk to help your agents provide great customer experiences. Take a look!

The Customer Advocacy team at Zendesk noticed a spike in ticket volume in the summer of 2019. There’s no way we could have known that less than a year later we’d be in the midst of a global pandemic that has resulted in a surge in ticket volumes across a wide range of industries. As the situation continues to unfold, self service is emerging as a practical solution for customers and businesses alike.

Hiring skilled customer service agents is the most important part of providing an exceptional customer service experience. But once you have the right people, in order for them to realize their potential, you need to equip them with the right tools. Now that 96% of people use cell phones, part of supplying agents with what they need is giving them a way to do their job from a mobile device.

Some have been slow to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning as part of their customer service strategy, but as organizations face resource and staffing constraints due to the pandemic, automation is not just nice to have—it can really help. Customers still need support, and AI-powered tools like Answer Bot, our self-service bot, can help meet the demand without requiring hands-on help from an agent.

Studies of customer feedback already tell us that the majority of customers prefer to solve their problems on their own over contacting a support agent. It makes sense—self-service puts the customer in the driver’s seat, empowering them to be autonomous and find the right answers with speed. But self-service is also better for businesses. It enables them to do more with less and frees their support teams’ time up for higher-stakes issues that require a human touch.

Smartphones have become a common part of everyday life. Pew research reports that 96% of people in the United States use cell phones. And with their ubiquity, text messaging has become one of the most common forms of communication in modern life. Recent research from Text Request found that 97% of smartphone users had texted in the past week. For businesses, that makes text messaging an important channel to include in your customer support strategy.

In today’s omnichannel world of live chat, social media, email, and more, it can be easy to overlook the critical role that phone support still plays for many customers. In fact, phone is still the most common way that customers prefer to contact customer service at a company, according to Benchmark data.

Zendesk takes security very seriously—just ask the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies that trust us with their data. We use a combination of enterprise-class security features and comprehensive audits of our applications, systems, and networks to ensure that your data is always protected, which means every customer can rest easy—our own included.

At any moment, there are more than 20 million containers at sea, transporting everything from raw materials like oil, steel, and wood, to consumer products like TVs, toys, and textiles. That makes operating ports complicated business, which is why companies like 1-Stop Connections, which provides SaaS solutions to keep those ports working efficiently, are so vital.

Not every company has the staff, tools, and skills required to meet their customers’ expectations of call center service. For example, 51% of consumers expect a response in under five minutes when they call a company, according to The Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020. But for a small eCommerce team, meeting this expectation may not always be possible. That’s where a BPO call center comes in.

Loyal customers are the bedrock of any booming business. After all, loyal customers are repeat customers; they’re generally the most likely to promote a business on social media; they tend to report the highest levels of customer satisfaction; they have the lowest churn rate; and they can boost a company’s net promoter score. Customer retention is critical. But keeping customers happy and loyal for the long haul is easier said than done.

More often than not, shoppers’ impressions of companies are based on interactions with support agents. After all, customers rarely interact directly with businesses outside of support calls—especially if the company is online-based. Your agents need the proper training and tools to handle those calls in a way that makes the customer feel heard and appreciated. Below are six call center training tips to ensure your agents can deliver a positive, helpful customer experience.

Businesses are laser-focused on customer experience and customer service today. And as work transitions from in-person to remote, customers are heavily relying on digital channels for help. This is no different for your employees — they need digital internal help desk solutions now more than ever. Companies are leaning even more heavily on technology to keep their customers and employees connected while the world is in survival mode.

Forget what you think you know about customer support, for now. In just a few short months, COVID-19 has transformed the way businesses and customers interact. As customers, we’ve heard from just about every company we’ve ever done business with. Remember that hair salon you went to in college? How about that time you bought dad new grill equipment from an online supplier? One after another, subject lines read like concerned emails from friends.

Managing change isn’t just a normal part of business, it’s a normal part of life. Yet learning how to manage change well doesn’t come naturally, it’s a skill that has to be developed and honed. That’s especially true for organizational change, which often involves a lot of moving parts, including different people, systems, technologies, and goals. For your desired changes to take root, your organization needs people that possess change management skills.

Increasingly, customers are expressing their strong, independent selves by helping themselves and solving problems on their own. In fact, high performing customer experience teams are 76% more likely to offer self-service for just this reason, according to Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report, 2020. However, simply offering a standard knowledge base portal isn’t enough—the design of your help center affects your customers’ experience with your brand.

With how fast industries move, technologies advance, and current events shift, organizational change is now a normal part of doing business. But change is rarely easy. And the bigger and more complex a business is, the more challenging it is to implement change effectively. Yet the ability to incorporate necessary changes into how you do business plays a direct role in long-term success.

In a world of chatbots and email, you might guess that shoppers today rarely call businesses. The opposite is true; according to The Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020, the phone is still the most common tool customers use to resolve issues with a company. That’s true even for millennials and Gen Z. An analysis of 45,000 companies shows that more than 50% of their millennial and Gen Z customers call businesses.