Customer service trends on tour: Bringing our 2024 report to life

Every year, we survey thousands of customer service professionals to get a pulse on what’s happening in the support space and publish our findings in our annual Customer Service Trends Report. And while creating the report is one half of the magic, bringing it to life with the help of our team, customers, and peers is the part I love the most.

For the 2024 edition of our report, we brought the customer service trends on tour. From global webinars to in-person events in Paris, New York, and London, we’ve had a blast unpacking the data and insights and getting our speakers’ and audiences’ takes on what’s happening in the customer service space.

Here’s the rundown of the Customer Service Trends 2024 tour and the stops we made along the way – as well as details of where you can catch up on some of the action in case you missed it.

Discussing the future of customer service

Across all of our webinars and events, we had a ton of insightful, engaging questions and conversations about how customer service is being transformed, and how these changes are being felt in our companies and wider industries.

The CS landscape is evolving so quickly, and we’re all learning as we go. It’s more important than ever for us to be having these conversations, sharing strategies and tactics to set our teams up for success in this new era of AI-powered support, openly discussing what’s failed and isn’t working, and paving the way forward together.

Here are some key takeaways from the discussions:

• The demand for instant, efficient support is on the rise: AI’s role in customer service is expanding quickly, and now that customers are getting used to super fast responses and resolutions, it’s what they expect. This isn’t going away and AI will be key to meeting customers’ expectations and staying competitive.
• Start small and iterate: Taking a phased approach to rolling out AI can help you make a smooth transition to new ways of working. For example, you can initially give AI lower-complexity issues to deal with, monitor its responses to spot any gaps in your knowledge base and optimize your content, and gradually increase its involvement rate in more complex conversations as you go.
• AI is there to enhance, not replace human interactions: “Is AI going to take my job?” has been a top-of-mind question for a lot of support folks since ChatGPT arrived on the scene. The answer is mostly “no.” Support roles are evolving, new roles are being created, and the main parts of support jobs that AI is coming for are the monotonous, repetitive parts. This will free up support teams to focus on more complex tasks and create value in other impactful areas for their businesses.
• Tech stacks and metrics need a reboot in an AI-first world: Last-generation tools and old success measures aren’t going to cut it in this new age of customer service. An AI-first approach will require a modern, complete customer service platform with AI at its core – not added on to the edges.

Worldwide webinars

This year we hosted two webinars, spanning time zones across Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. These webinars were jam-packed with insightful conversations with customers and viewers about the trends that are resonating most with them, and how they’re navigating the once-in-a-generation shift to a world of AI-powered customer service.

I was thrilled to join the panel of our first 2024 Customer Service Trends webinar and dive into this year’s report with Matt Dale, Founder of Moxie CX, Allie Talavera, CX Program Manager at AppFolio, and Jared Brier, Founder and Co-CEO at AKKO.

You can catch up on the recording of my fun conversation with Matt, Allie, and Jared here

For the second installment of our webinar series, Intercom’s Sales Development Manager Dominic Bower hosted a conversation between our own Director of Customer Support Operations Anthony Lopez and Scott Donnelly, Customer Operations Enablement Manager at SiteMinder.

You can catch up on the recording of Anthony and Scott’s deep dive into the 2024 customer service trends here

Full-house events

We hosted three in-person events in New York, London, and Paris to explore the trends and insights we shared in our Customer Service Trends Report for 2024.

Just check out these lineups.

🇬🇧 First stop: London

Two of our Intercom teammates – Eric Fitzgerald, Manager of Customer Support, and Peter Dalton, Senior Relationship Manager – took to the stage in London with Deborah Corless, Director of Customer Experience at Numan, and Nick Hills, Head of Support at Birdie.

🇺🇲 Second stop: New York

At our next stop in NY, I was joined by Chris Van Heran, Senior Manager of Business Systems Strategy at Octane, and JT Vega, Director of Product Support at Labelbox.

🇫🇷 Last stop: Paris

At our final stop of the tour, Intercom’s Senior Manager of Customer Support Franka Martinovic and Customer Success Manager Laurene Gachon sat down with Hilary Lawrence, Customer Support Operations Manager at Agorapulse, Auguste Guerlay, Head of Partnerships at Onepilot, and Clarisse Mehrain, Customer Care Team Lead at Choco.

Continuing the conversation

It’s been an awesome time since we published our Customer Service Trends Report back in January – in the best way possible. It’s been a ton of fun getting to unpack all of the trends, data, and insights from this year’s report with so many incredible folks as we figure out how to tackle the immense opportunities ahead together.

To everyone who joined us, whether virtually or in person, thank you. Your engagement, questions, and insights have been true highlights of the 2024 customer service trends tour.

Here’s to continuing the conversation. Until next time 👋

(PS: Cannoli work really well as swag, just in case you were wondering.)