Since his days serving treats at Dairy Queen, to cashiering at Shopko—which, fun fact, is how he met his wife—to supporting Zendesk customers as a Tier 1 support agent, Brett Bowser is a customer-service natural. After more than three years answering customer queries as a front-line advocate, Brett is now a Community Engagement Specialist in Zendesk’s Madison, Wis. office, where he applies years of hands-on customer-service skills to a different kind of support experience.

Every day, customers are comparing you to the best customer experiences they have, even if that’s Amazon and you’re a time-honored regional banking institution that has never shipped a book or a case of cereal in its 150-year history. Not fair but true all the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re good; you have to improve. No longer are most people willing to carve out time in their day for a trip to a brick-and-mortar trip just to do a simple transaction.

Learn about some great news app to help improve and extend your Zendesk experience.

Personalized customer service, and a personalized customer experience, means that a business 1) knows its customers and their needs, and 2) is willing and able to provide them as efficiently as possible. This is sometimes called personalization at scale: where software solutions help provide the context necessary for assisting customers in need or pointing them efficiently to what they want.

Machine learning in customer service is used to provide a higher level of convenience for customers and efficiency for support agents. Support-focused tools enabled with machine learning are growing in popularity thanks to their increasing ease-of-use and successful applications across a variety of industries. Gartner predicts that by 2021, 15 percent of customer service interactions will be handled completely by artificial intelligence.

An active user community within a help center is a great way for users to connect with one another, share ideas, and get answers to questions. Communities like these are helpful for companies scaling their support operations, because they allow users to get help from the people who most deeply understand their needs—their peers. Here’s how the Zendesk Community works and why it’s valuable in improving and enhancing the customer experience.

Most customer service systems keep customer data siloed within each channel, i.e., in chat, phone, or email. A customer’s information and history with your company could be locked up in their chat history, but now that same customer is trying to solve their problem over the phone.

Change management might be needed for all sorts of reasons, such as an implementation of a new technology, transition to a new strategy, or an organizational change. Without a change management process to ensure success, all kinds of disruptions can occur, slowing down productivity and eating away at resources. Change management refers to the process, tools, and techniques used to manage the human side of change to achieve the required or desired business outcome.

Sales and support teams aren’t meant to be in silos—both have too much important information on the customer to keep them apart. Sales teams provide crucial context into who their customers are and what they want, and support has critical insights into how expectations are being met.

If long-term predictions about artificial intelligence bear out, the way we work will soon be upended in ways not seen since the Industrial Revolution—but in the meantime, AI is already helping humans work better and smarter. And in customer service, AI stands to help support teams emphasize that most human of skills, empathy—a trait that no software program can match (well, at least until the singularity).