As we set sail into 2025, the business landscape feels a little uncertain, but we can guarantee your customers rightly expect you to deliver a fantastic service experience.

To keep you on the cutting edge, we’re here to cut through the hype and hyperbole, and let you know the key trends we see making waves this year:

1. Focus on Customer Experience (CX):

In a world where consumers are closely watching what they spend, the value you can offer is under the microscope. Customer experience is literally about adding value to the buying experience, making things easy, and giving people the peace of mind that if something goes wrong, you won’t leave them high and dry. Our clients are prioritising customer experience as a key differentiator in the marketplace. Online reputation, social proof, and trust are directly related to your customer experience and are more important than ever.

That means our clients not only expect us to provide exceptional support to their customers but also strategic insights to enhance the overall customer journey, from pre- to post-purchase, ensuring that every interaction leaves a lasting impression. Our recommendation is to look holistically at the customer experience, listen to what your clients are telling you, and what they’re not telling you, and analyse any data points you have for insights that you can action.

2. Omnichannel Support: 

It’s a stretch to call this a trend because we’ve been doing it for over a decade, but customers expect seamless communication across various channels, from social media to live chat. It’s not even a special experience anymore. You need to know all about Susan on Facebook’s history with your business and people need an experience tailored to the channel they get in touch with you. Don’t tell people to call or email you on social media, sort them out there and then.

Our approach at Preface is to ensure that support teams are equipped with the right systems, and empowered with initiative, to provide consistent service across all platforms. You can do the same by empowering support staff with access to relevant systems and relevant training on how to use them.

3. Hyper-Personalised Service:

Expectations have significantly increased in online customer experience but a personal touch can still surprise and delight. Businesses are leveraging advanced data analytics to tailor experiences even more precisely, ensuring customers feel uniquely valued and understood. But you don’t need enterprise systems to do this well. Taking a little extra time to look up and reference a customer’s purchase and communication history before responding can make them feel special and valued.

4. Flexibility and Scalability:

The ability to adapt to fluctuating demand is increasingly vital, especially as businesses look to maximise efficiency. This could mean cross-skilling your teams to make sure you’ve got flexible staff to move between social, email, calls, chat etc. Or even supporting and augmenting your existing team with someone like Preface to handle longer hours and heavier volumes.

At Preface, a big part of what we do is giving businesses those flexible solutions, so they can scale their customer service operations up or down as needed while delivering a consistent brilliant service experience.

5. Enhanced Training Programs:

As customer service continues to evolve, so do the skills required.
With advances in technology leading to significant updates and opportunities through software integrations, training programs will now need to cover not only the new technical skills for managing customer conversations and data but also focus on risk, moderation and advanced communication skills for when things go wrong.

We’re always investing in comprehensive training programs to ensure our teams are well-prepared to meet the demands of our client’s customers, and we’re employing technology that enables us to do this super efficiently.

6. AI Integration:

It wouldn’t be 2025 without talking about artificial intelligence. From chatbots that handle basic enquiries to predictive analytics that anticipate customer needs, to internal systems that assist with capturing customer data or training agents, AI has the potential to make businesses more efficient. But beware that a lot of the buzz about AI is coming from places that have a vested interest in it, and many customers are sceptical and still prefer a human touch. We recommend thinking about low-risk areas of the customer experience where AI can add significant value, but to ensure that the areas that really matter to your customers are still human-led.

As we navigate these trends, staying informed will help you keep your customer service shipshape and ready for anything the sea may bring in 2025!