Last year, we highlighted some of the key customer service trends to watch in 2018 and many of them came to fruition. The shift in perception of AI and automation was arguably the most significant. Once a thought of the distant future, many companies began adding these concepts to their workflows and roadmaps. Once again, for the third year in a row, here are 7 customer service trends to watch in 2019…

The fundamental principles that define effective customer service apply across all industries and business types. But certain distinctive characteristics of the business-to-business (B2B) environment can have a huge influence on your approach to training customer service staff.

To develop products in the right direction, we need to research the experiences of our users, discover their needs and unpack the insights. As product managers, designers and researchers, we have a large toolset to discover what our users want and how it corresponds with business needs. But how should we figure out what matters the most? This is where a thoughtful UX survey can be useful. Here are some steps that can help you get the most out of a survey.

It’s almost that time of the year again! The holiday season is here – and what is usually a season of cheer and happiness, can be a nightmare for customer support teams. A lot of industries see a huge influx of customers during the holiday season which directly results in a large number of customers needing support and expecting to have their issues resolved as quick as possible.

Every industry has its own version of the “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” scenario, and the Internet is no different. In this case, digital marketers and customer service professionals tend to clash over the question: does great user experience translate to great customer experience? Or is it the other way around?

The end of the year marks a good time to reflect on the passed year and the achievements made by the team. 2018 was, in many ways, a landmark year for Wire. From a product perspective we launched Wire Pro, our business product, in early 2018 and later added Wire Red, our unique crisis collaboration tool, to our product line. That in itself was a big milestone for us. We can now see business’ over five continents using our products.

User research plays a critical function when you are building tech products and services. This practice helps teams understand the user’s perspective, including their unmet needs, delights, and pain points, but also how they connect to the brand and product in an emotional way. User researchers also serve as a bridge between customers or users and the product, engineering, and company leadership teams.

Offering omnichannel customer service is the core of any organization’s support strategy. But, in some cases it’s not possible for agents to do everything, and it’s critical that there is a plan in place for assigning agents to channels. There are two methodologies for channel assignment: a shared agent model and a dedicated one. In a shared model, agents handle some or all channels simultaneously. In a dedicated model, agents are focused on a single channel.

Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is a new end-to-end encrypted protocol that is developed by an IETF workgroup. Wire initiated the idea, along with Mozilla and Cisco, in 2016 with other contributors joining the efforts later: the University of Oxford, Facebook, INRIA, Google, Twitter. MLS’s major goals are to make end-to-end encrypted messaging in (large) groups efficient and more secure and to become an open standard.

The warnings say robots are coming for our jobs, but it’s more accurate to say they—AI-supported automation, that is—are taking over tasks that should be automated anyway. Taking the rote functions out of a customer service agent’s job is the perfect way to leverage AI, but support roles must evolve parallel with the technology.