Customers want to feel understood and heard, and this requires empathy. People with strong empathic abilities are better at establishing long-term customer relationships. But the problem is empathy can be a difficult skill to teach. Since it’s an emotional subject, it can be challenging to find hands-on learning activities, and you don’t want training to feel too forced or heavy-handed.

With customer experience becoming more important than ever, interactive customer experience conferences are the need of the hour. Whether it’s a virtual experience, in-person event or a hybrid summit, companies are reimagining customer journeys to reduce friction, accelerating the shift to digital channels, and providing for new safety requirements. With the ongoing global crisis, many organizers have switched to hybrid and virtual conferences.

Conducting an impactful customer service performance review sets the stage not just for the evaluation and growth of your team members but can also identify larger trends within your support strategy. However, many pieces make up an individual’s customer support career development, and it can get difficult to track them regularly. You’ve got performance metrics to pay attention to, career growth, and paths of interest for your customer service representatives.

Imagine opening your Netflix account and seeing four independent Turkish television shows, an advertisement for a German horror movie, and three movies you’ve already seen, but didn’t really like. Not very helpful, right? Fortunately, Netflix has customized their product to offer personalized recommendations in a way that will please their users, and keep them coming back for more.

As CX speaker Zig Ziglar once said: “If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.” When you consider that just a 5% increase in customer retention can boost your profits by as much as 95%, the rewards for gaining and maintaining customer trust are massive. A few extra seconds of effort is all it takes to make a customer’s day.

2 years into the pandemic, the business landscape has changed with the speed of light. While 74% of professionals expect remote work to become standard, managing a distributed workforce has its unique challenges. Overseeing disjointed teams and handling resource crunch has led to fragmented data, frustrated agents, and poor customer experience. This has made companies ask themselves whether they are ready for the future of work?

Customer service representatives rely on their listening skills to understand how a customer feels about a product or service, to resolve customer complaints and to ensure customer satisfaction. However, the first step to active listening is hearing what customers have to say. But what’s the difference between the two? Customer Service listening skills involve not only noting down the words spoken by the customer, but also the nuances of the issue raised.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in customer service isn’t a new concept. Harnessing the true power of AI has been an ongoing conversation in the CX world for years, but it’s a notoriously hard thing to get right. Customer-bot interactions can swing wildly from absolutely incredible to brand-damaging, depending on how AI was implemented and how successfully it learned from prior interactions.

The last two years have proven that customer-first businesses must be flexible to thrive. That means meeting customers where they are—and where they haven’t been able to be. How do you, as a business, satisfy the human need for social interaction amid physical distancing? How do you nurture brand loyalty when you can’t work off of facial cues? And—keeping your ultimate goal in mind—how do you convert interactions into sales and ensure a good experience remotely?

Although most agents enjoy solving customer problems, the pandemic has put them under a new kind of pressure. Mix frustrated customers, soaring query volumes, budget cuts, and new remote work setups, and you’ve got a recipe for burnout. In 2022, many businesses recognize the importance of workplace mental health, and are taking steps to ensure the well-being of their teams.