There’s an oft-cited stat that text messages from businesses have a 98 percent open rate, but there’s a lot more to business texting than just outbounding customers. Customer service has been transformed by messaging. In 2020, support requests surged over messaging apps, with WhatsApp seeing 101 percent growth from the previous year. Only 15 percent of surveyed customers said they preferred to use SMS as a customer support channel when available. The lesson?

Many customer service agents reach a point in their career when they decide they want to transition into a new role. Those next steps could take you in many directions: sales, customer success, or people ops, to name a few. But one of the most likely moves is to become a customer service manager. After years of helping customers find answers to their queries and honing your service skills, you’re ready to take on more responsibility.

Businesses work hard to attract customers, and keeping them around takes just as much effort. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, half of customers say they would switch to a competitor after just one negative experience—that number grows to more than 80 percent after multiple bad experiences. A “bad experience” can happen at any touchpoint in the customer’s journey, from their first interaction all the way to final sale and beyond.

As a customer service agent, being a great communicator means everything. But your ability to communicate well goes beyond listening to what your customers and team members say. You also have to recognize how they’re expressing themselves and adapt your responses accordingly. Understanding the various communication styles can help you improve your relationships with customers and colleagues alike.

Consumers around the world have changed their shopping habits over the past year, with e-commerce seeing unprecedented growth. In fact, research by McKinsey shows that 10 years of ecommerce adoption was compressed into just three months in 2020. Ecommerce is positioned to keep growing for the next five years and beyond, with new brands looking for ways to set themselves apart. One of the best ways to differentiate in the competitive ecommerce world is to offer a better digital customer experience.

The impact of the last year on customer experience will be long-lasting. Customers have adapted their expectations, teams have learned how to operate remotely, and businesses are ramping up tech adoption as they look for new ways to engage customers while staying connected to each other. According to the CX Trends report, companies plan to invest more in customer experience across the organization.

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

Personal finance is so important to consumers that more than a third of Americans review their checking account balance daily. Meanwhile, the rise in popularity of financial technology solutions, (fintech), means that more people than ever can make life-changing money moves with a tiny computer in their pockets. In fact, Fintech startups have a real opportunity to transform how customers engage with the global economy, but the stakes are high.

You could say that Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and founder of the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, knows a thing or two about building startups. When we sat down with Ohanian for our CX Academy Live event, he shared his experience as an entrepreneur and the many lessons learned along the way—from his days responding to customer feedback emails at Reddit to his current role at Seven Seven Six helping the next generation of startups push forward.

To offer superior support, customer service teams need their systems, tools, processes—and most of all—people to work in harmony. But in lieu of personalized service, self-service support is your stand-in, and it needs to be just as good as your agents. This harmonious approach is important because 69 percent of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own using self customer service options, according to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report.