Personalize your interactions: The customer context tools you need

When a customer shops in person, there are usually personal cues that store reps can use to understand a situation. Say a customer can’t find a shirt in their size and is extremely frustrated because they had a stressful day. Usually, body language, like tensed shoulders or a firm mouth line, can help a store rep read the situation better and offer customized, individualized support.

Customer context is crucial when offering personalized support, but it’s generally lost in the online experience. Without body language or vocal cues, it can be hard to know what a customer needs most. It’s about time support teams had more customer context in online situations—that way agents don’t walk into situations blind and, in turn, they can provide a more personal experience.

The invisible, impossible journey

Too many support teams have little insight into the customer journey. Most support teams don’t have visibility into their customers’ journey when they start a conversation ticket. It’s a problem when 38 percent of our customers say they don’t have visibility into their customers’ journey when they start a ticket.

Not only that, support teams often deal with inadequate tools, forcing them to juggle back and forth—wasting their time and the customer’s time. Zero visibility combined with a slew of tools can ultimately lead to slow ticket resolution. Twenty-five percent of Zendesk customers said looking for customer data outside of Zendesk Support led to slow ticket resolution.

Customer context is key

To help solve the lack of insight into the customer’s journey, a worldwide customer service issue, we wanted to make it simpler for support teams to manage the tools they use. Enter the card and interaction history in Zendesk Support. The card displays relevant details on the customer your agent is serving, such as contact information, language, and freeform notes. For example, an agent might look into a customer request and see that an agent previously working on the request left a note: “This customer has had several rough interactions with us. It might be a good idea to give them a discount to retain them.” This customer context helps ease the agent’s interaction with the customer while simultaneously improving the customer’s experience.

The interaction history lets agents gain visibility to all previous interactions with the customer, whether it’s requests submitted or specific events that have happened, like web or shopping cart activity. Both tools give agents the relevant context on who they’re serving and what the customer’s experience has been so far. By giving agents a wealth of information, they can provide faster, more personalized responses back to customers.

Seamless support

After implementing these new features, 85 percent of Zendesk customers agreed that they’re now able to understand their customers’ journey better. Plus, 71 percent said they were able to gain a better understanding of the interactions their customers were having with their company, and 64 percent agreed they were able to simplify their ticket workflow because they now have customer context within Zendesk.

“Having the interaction history and card features is an actual dream come true because it provides our agents with more context on our customers,” says Isabelle Thorton, Technical Support Engineer at Outreach.io.

Part of delivering seamless omnichannel support is providing agents the right tools that will give them the right context on the customer. When it comes to support, Zendesk strives to improve the overall satisfaction of the end customer, help agents be as productive as they can, and ultimately help our customers scale. The card and interaction history was created to help provide seamless omnichannel support and to give agents the tools they need to personalize their responses.

You can learn more about these customer context features here.