The Intercom Customer Service Trends Report 2023 is here!

Hey there,

Most of us can relate to the fear of not living up to expectations; from hiding school reports from our parents, to that hard-hitting “you can do better” speech from our sports coaches, and now, delivering what customers want from us. For the third year in a row, we've released the Intercom Customer Service Trends Report, surveying support leaders across the world (more than 1700 of them!) to find out what trends they’re noticing, what they’re worried about, and what they’re doing to stay on top.

First, the scary news: customer expectations are now higher than ever. In fact, 83% of support teams say they noticed a rise in customer expectations, up from 75% in 2021.

Ok, on to the positives. More teams now feel prepared to meet these expectations: 40% are positive about their ability to step up in 2023, versus 34% in our 2022 report. Businesses that take steps now to get ahead of their customers’ wants and needs can begin to close the gap.

But that’s not all. We’ve taken those invaluable insights and pulled out five top trends guiding the customer service industry in 2023. From automation, to team morale, to personalization, it’s all in there, as well as top tips for teams looking to close the customer expectation gap. Here are some of the major takeaways:

AI and automation is becoming increasingly important for teams looking to offer a world-class customer experience at scale
Support team morale is low, but the right technology can help
Disjointed tech stacks are making support reps’ jobs more difficult

Don’t stop there! Dive into the full report to find out what the top customer service trends for 2023 mean for your team. We hope it helps!

Happy reading,

What we've been writing

Des trAynor & Fergal Reid

ChatGPT is here to stay. Where will it take us?

Intercom’s Co-founder Des Traynor and Director of Machine Learning Fergal Reid catch up for another AI-themed discussion. This time they’ve taken it beyond Intercom and customer service to dive into all things GPT – from skepticism to its role in business communications, from the disruption of creative work to the future of user interfaces.

Some takeaways:

These models have unlocked many new capabilities, but they still lack the common sense reasoning needed to pass the Turing test.
It’s not just the tech that’s improving – we’re getting better at understanding what to build, how to customize it and integrate it into products.
The future of human-machine interfaces may be facilitated by personalized AI-powered bots that understand the users' intentions and mediate their interactions.

liam geraghty

AI in the designer’s toolbox: Shaping the future with ChatGPT

In an instant, ChatGPT has redefined the boundaries of what’s possible. It’s also raised a lot of questions for product designers, the people who will decide what our AI future world will look and feel like. Last week, some of Intercom’s product designers got together to share their thoughts on where we’re going.

Dive in to hear their thoughts:

New design patterns might emerge to deal with “hallucinations”, like building confidence scores into the features.
Over time, businesses will be able to build layers with specialized knowledge on top of open source models using proprietary data from their industry or company.
In the future, interacting with AI may involve conversational, graphical, and even neural interfaces.

Announcing the Customer Service Trends Report 2023

Beth McEntee

Announcing ‘The Intercom Customer Service Trends Report 2023’

To help support teams get ahead of the curve for 2023, we’re delighted to launch The Intercom Customer Service Trends Report for 2023.

We surveyed 1,700+ support leaders in multiple countries to:

Find out how they’re planning to respond to the challenges and opportunities that 2023 brings.
Reveal the top five trends transforming the world of customer service.
Offer actionable insights to help set support teams up for success and move the needle for their businesses.

niamh o'Connor

The ultimate guide to live chat support

Over the years, we have consistently emphasized our core philosophy around customer messaging – send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, in the right place. And today, there’s one channel where more potential customers are than anywhere else: live chat.

In this ultimate guide, we’ve explored the benefits of live chat, best practices for folding it into your customer service offering, and some of the top examples that you can implement straight away, including using live chat to:

Increase agent productivity.
Encourage visitors to complete a task.
Create a unified customer experience.

Customer service tweet of the week

We couldn't agree more with this tweet from founder and podcast host Bradley Flowers. Check out our conversation with writing coach Leslie O'Flahavan for some tips on talking to your customers.