Going into the New Year, businesses need to understand trends shifting their competition’s business and how consumers and clients engage with their vendors. In addition, with the landscape of customer service changing so much over the past few years, client expectations and the goals of the businesses that serve them are also changing. Many of these trends are responses to the noticeable economic and social changes happening worldwide, while others have remained consistent over time.

Small businesses may be used to handling customer concerns as they come by simply taking calls or complaints on the spot. However, as businesses and their clientele both grow, this kind of impromptu system becomes unviable. Too many complaints come through too many channels, requiring businesses to find a better solution. If not, they will almost certainly contend with low customer satisfaction and potential legal issues.

Customer service is a complex process. Software tools can help businesses simplify this process, and can also help improve the customer experience by improving client perceptions during interactions to settle questions or concerns. This improves customer satisfaction, and in turn, makes consumers more open to making repeat purchases. Such software tools vary in feature sets, but their general purpose is to make the ticket-handling process more efficient.

Customer service (CS) seems like a simple enough concept on the surface. And yet, the practices and preparation required—to provide a truly unique customer experience and create loyal clients—take a greater depth of understanding and experience to get things right. This is especially true for meeting the needs of businesses, which are naturally more complex and comprehensive than those of individual consumers.

Your customer experience is your business growth driver. Unfortunately, the gap between what companies think they’re delivering and what customers believe is wide; 87% of companies believe their customer experience is excellent, but only 11% of customers agree. So, if you use your customer experience as a growth strategy, you must address your customer service management system first.

Integrations are critical to a strong customer experience because they help your software connect and become a unified service platform that shows a full customer journey. This can provide insight that helps you continuously improve.

A customer service management platform is a software platform that provides a variety of tools, information, and workflows relating to customer service and the customer experience. It goes beyond the functions of a more basic ticketing system while still offering the vital functions that those systems provide. A CSM platform will enable you to manage better relationships, boost productivity and improve the customer journey.

ITIL 4 establishes the service value system (SVS) to show “how all the components and activities of an organization work together to facilitate value creation.” This is comprised of five elements: It’s vital to understand the core principles before you can relate them to customer service, as they all play a role in the customer journey.

To improve the customer experience, business leaders should lean on proven best practices. While there are many proven ways to give customers a better impression of a business, we recommend doing the following three first: ITIL best practices haven’t historically been utilized in CSM operations or improvements. Still, frameworks like ITIL and COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology) have a lot of innovation and efficiency to offer within the customer experience.

B2B Customer Service can make or break a company; at the center of that service lies the customer experience (CX). But while 87% of companies believe they provide a strong customer experience, only 11% of their customer base agrees. For B2B companies, that disparity can be particularly damaging. Business customers tend to have a higher standard when it comes to service. They’re typically spending more and coming to the table with more clout than the average consumer.