Everything you need to know to get ahead over the next year

Hi there,

If 2023 was the year we discovered the colossal opportunity generative AI offers to customer service, then 2024 is the year we harness that opportunity. At Intercom, we believe AI will completely transform customer service for the better, and we’re excited to be at the forefront.

We’re not the only ones – so many support teams are ready to take the plunge, and lots already have. But as with any new technology, we’re in uncharted territory. When everything is in so much flux, it can sometimes feel like everybody is making it up as they go along – and so it’s extra important to know how your industry peers are handling the transition.

Enter The Intercom Customer Service Trends Report 2024. It provides a snapshot of one of the most transformational periods in customer service history, capturing the hopes, fears, experiences, and future plans of more than 2,000 customer support professionals – as well as actionable tips to help you take the right steps at this crucial moment. Knowing that our peers across customer service are encountering similar challenges and discovering significant benefits will help us validate our assumptions and makes this AI revolution feel a whole lot more manageable – we hope it does the same for you.

The report dives into the five key trends shaping the space right now, including rising customer expectations, increased AI adoption, changing tech stacks, and how CS metrics are evolving. As CS leaders ourselves, we were particularly struck by a few fascinating insights:

1. We need to help our teams to understand and trust AI

The report tells us that 56% of support professionals are optimistic that AI can increase the success of their teams – but what about the other 44%? It can be tempting to wait around and see what happens when it comes to a new technology, but this report makes it clear that teams who get ahead of the curve will see incredible benefits. One of our top priorities this year has been making sure the team is 100% with us on this AI journey, reassuring them that AI won’t take their jobs, but instead make them more fulfilling and interesting.

2. AI will make life easier for customer service teams

There’s been a lot of talk about the ways AI will make companies more efficient, profitable, and innovative. But very little has been said about the day-to-day work of customer service agents. The report shows that improving workflow efficiency is a priority for 47% of C-level execs. AI is perfect for the job, but without identifying clear accompanying benefits for their support teams, execs can expect to create an even bigger optimism gap between leaders and those on the front lines.

By removing the everyday repetitive (and sometimes downright annoying) little tasks that take up so much of our time, AI will transform support jobs for the better. It’s already happening – our teams use AI in the inbox all the time to help them craft messages, curate their tone for various situations, and summarize conversations for speedier catch-up.

3. Support roles are evolving

We were so excited to read that teams across the support landscape are investing in new skill sets and roles to uplevel their AI support offering. We’ve been thinking a lot about how a support agent’s job will look in this new world, and the extra skills we’ll need to add to our teams – and it was great to see that other teams are moving in the same direction, foreseeing roles like chatbot analysts, conversational UX mappers, conversation designers, and other roles we could never have predicted just over a year ago.

Those are our major takeaways, but this report is overflowing with insights, actionable advice, and quotes from customer service professionals. Let us know what surprises you – and what doesn’t. We’d love to hear from you!

Happy reading,

Ruth and Bobby

This article is an excerpt from our email newsletter. Sign up here for the latest on how AI is transforming customer service, as well as actionable advice on staying ahead of the curve, delivered to your inbox twice a month.