The customer service industry is continually evolving. It seems like every day there’s a new social media platform your agents need to adopt to stay relevant to your customers. The good news is, one thing hasn’t changed: People still prefer a phone call over any other customer support channel. (Yes, even millennials.) If you want to win over your customers for life, you need to offer exceptional over-the-phone customer support.

The customer service requests your agents field have something valuable to tell you about your customers, product, and business. More than that, the cumulative data produced by your customer service tickets can reveal key insights. But for your business to learn from the information included within all those requests, you need a good method for tracking and analyzing them.

We’ve all heard the stories of companies going above and beyond to provide their customers with incredible support: Some of these stories are heart-warming. Some are inspiring. And some garnered good PR and attention on social media. One thing they all have in common, though: None of them is scalable. No restaurant could afford to deliver an airport steak to its entire customer base. And while giraffe bread hit the mark, it wouldn't be advisable for companies to take every branding suggestion.

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

Any type of career a person chooses will require developing a relevant skill set. Sometimes it’s largely a matter of gaining a pertinent body of knowledge—doctors need to learn as much about the health and medical fields as possible, for instance. People who choose to work in customer-facing roles have to learn a set of skills that are as much about honing personality traits as learning facts. Working with customers can be immensely rewarding for people who enjoy helping others.

When someone tells you they spent hours on the phone with customer service, it’s usually a horror story. We all know the tropes of the genre—torturously long waits, endless transfers, inescapable hold music... But at Zendesk, some of our support agents take pride in their longest customer calls.

High performing customer experience teams are more than twice as likely as underperforming teams to be taking an omnichannel approach, according to Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report, 2020. Yet Zendesk findings also revealed that only 35 percent of Benchmark companies have an omnichannel strategy in place. This gap represents a sweet spot where businesses can rise above their competition and differentiate on the basis of customer experience.

A contact center and a call center are essentially the same thing, right? Well, yes and no. Call centers only field phone calls, whereas a contact center offers a variety of other ways for customers to reach out for support: email, chat, self-service, messaging apps, and social media. Why is it important to understand the difference? While a call center might work for your business, chances are your customers will be better served via a contact center.

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase customer value? You might think about money—giving customers a good price for a quality product. And 20 years ago, you’d have been right. But today, customer value encompasses much more. Today’s buyers don’t just care about a product’s price or even its quality. They also prioritize brand experiences.

People don’t generally open their wallets to spend money without getting something in return. Even when making a donation, there’s an incentive like feeling good or connecting to a cause. To be successful, businesses need to tap into unmet customer needs and offer solutions. Sounds simple — but how do you actually find out what’s on your customers’ minds?