The start of a new year is the perfect time to give your help center the refresh it deserves. For many ecommerce brands, the help center is one of the most underused support tools—yet it’s also one of the most powerful. 88% of customers already search your website for some kind of knowledge base or FAQ. Customers expect fast answers, and a well-designed, updated help center can meet their needs while taking some weight off your support team. We’ll walk you through why refreshing matters and how to do it.

If there’s one thing that can make or break a business, it’s how long a customer gets left on read. When a customer reaches out for help or simply has a question, long wait times can quickly impact your business’s bottom line. 36% of consumers will share a negative support experience with friends and family, 31% won’t complete their purchase and 30% will buy from a competitor instead.

For support teams, first response time (FRT), also called first reply time, for each customer inquiry is usually that make-or-break moment. This metric can draw a direct line from the level of customer care someone receives to if they remain a loyal customer.

Exceeding customer expectations isn’t as easy as it used to be. High inbound message volumes and rising customer care standards have left support teams hustling to keep resolution times low. It’s officially time to call in the bots—customer service chatbots, that is.

Don’t panic—no robot can replace a diligent customer service professional. They can, however, quickly handle the frequently asked questions that eat at your team’s bandwidth and leave less time for more pressing support needs.

It’s not enough to resolve customer service issues quickly anymore. Businesses need to meet their customers with the personalized service they’re accustomed to from brands across industries and channels. Like how the barista at your neighborhood coffee shop asks you “the usual?” when you walk in the door.

But departmental silos, limited understanding of the value of social customer care and clunky tech stacks hinder businesses from delivering quality customer service. Leaders who don’t invest in solving some of these issues will be leaving money on the table and putting their customers’ loyalty up for grabs.

Our biennial contact centre research is here, and with the collaboration of some of our top global partners, our trends report outlines where contact centres stand today and what can be expected within the next 5 years.  With the growing usage of AI but also the scepticism around it, businesses will have to find the balance between speed, effectiveness, and the vital importance of human to human connections. Our trends report will equip you with the insights and advice to future-proof your contact centre operations.

Crisis management is a fact of life for social media marketing teams. But that doesn’t make it any easier to handle. To help you out, we hosted a panel session on handling crises, navigating customer dissatisfaction, and responding to negative sentiment on social platforms, featuring insights from:

Rachel Karten, Social Media Consultant

Katie Yun, Director of Social Media Enablement at Nationwide

Companies are using AI-powered tools to reduce wait times, improve response times, analyze customer data, and offer personalized solutions. For organizations to harness the full potential of AI for customer service, they must make a concerted effort to understand their organization’s needs, capabilities and limitations and to evaluate the offerings available. Download the Harvard Business Review Pulse Survey to explore how companies are currently using AI solutions to improve customer experience (CX), what value they’re realizing and how they’re addressing the challenges they’re encountering, plus more:

Is delivering exceptional CX feeling too complex these days? Given the rise in customer expectations, new hyper-advanced technology, and ever-evolving metrics, consistently delivering exceptional customer experiences (CX) has only become more complicated. How do companies rise to meet the intensified needs of customers without buckling under the weight of sophisticated and advanced systems and operations?