As customer preferences change and technology makes astounding leaps what will customer service look like in the next few years? Colin Stokes, MD of Adiuvo examines how CX might evolve.
What truly makes for a good experience? That should be the first consideration or question in any customer facing organisation. As a company that, for example, dealt with over 27,000 interactions in 11 days of the Christmas holiday alone its something we often ask ourselves.
Our answer and the combined wisdom of CX experts suggest is; Speed, Convenience, Consistency. Friendliness and Personalisation all carried out with a human touch—that is, creating real connections by making technology feel more human and giving employees what they need to create better customer experiences.
Speed and convenience are 2 of the easier facets to attain, it’s a question of resources and management making enough of those resources available to fulfil your customers needs. Obviously enough staff to ensure quick responses be it emails, chat bots or phone calls with true consideration given to when your customer needs to contact you (evenings and weekends perhaps).
Consistency is a quality issue and only by investing in training and quality control can an organisation ensure that all channels provide customers with the correct information on, almost, every enquiry. Friendliness is not only about how your staff or technology interacts but how user friendly any experience is and any touchpoint should be reviewed whether its your initial IVR or webforms or FAQ’s.
With personalisation no company can afford to or needs to deliver a fully customized “ideal experience” to each individual customer across the range of digital, human, and static touchpoints and interactions. The fact is, some customers are simply worth more than others, and it takes a great deal of thought and data to identify which ones and act accordingly, but the results can be more than worth it and it’s the hardest thing for competitors to copy and enables companies to create truly differentiated, category-leading experiences that make interacting with them so relevant, so much more convenient, and so perfectly suited to customers’ wants and needs that they won’t even consider switching to a competitor.
With all that in mind what’s the delivery trends for customer interaction that will be coming to the fore?
1. Face-to-face video communication will increase.
Eye contact is powerful, and customers, more and more, will look at non-video, real-time voice conversation as a thing of the past. Companies using video — asynchronously, as “video voicemail” (e.g. Loom) or synchronously, as “video conference” (e.g. Zoom with video) — are a generation ahead.
We know that eye contact improves relationships and facilitates openness (whether that’s in business or in your personal life), so video is not just a growing expectation of consumers, but a viable business-improving tool for vendors. You should start using video voicemails now, and scheduled meetings with customers should involve a face-to-face meeting whenever possible.
2. Customers will expect an omni-channel service experience.
Customers need to be able to engage your company through a variety of digital mediums.
This increased accessibility will drive the need for omni-channel experiences. Omni-channel support is distinctively different from multichannel support as omni-channel syncs your communication channels together so both your team and your customers can work seamlessly between them.
For example, rather than customers having to navigate away from your social media page, your service team can respond to them wherever they’re engaging your business. Then, if the problem can’t be solved on one communication channel, your reps can easily transfer the case to another medium where they can better support the customer.
This reduces friction in the service experience because customers don’t have to log off one interface just to log into another one to continue working on the same problem.
3. Real-time messaging will outpace email.
Email is dead, and long live chat. Right?
Well, yes and no. Just like video, customers expect you to be always on — and most of them prefer to interact using chat than phone or email. Whatsapp or Messenger as a channel for support has pushed us ahead light years! Now, you can converse with businesses in real-time, and Facebook will even show you their average responsiveness (and if that responsiveness is poor, forget even engaging at all). The world operates in synchronous time now — so that means you need to amp up your communication technologies and strategies while still using email to share important documents and communications your customers will want to come back to again and again.
4. Remote work will become more normal.
The future of customer service will not only push customers online, but it’ll move service reps there, too.
These agents will have more tools to work remotely. They’ll field customer inquiries from the comfort of their homes, instead of having to work in an office setting.
5. Bots (and AI) will help professionals, not replace them.
Almost everyone has seen the recent impact of OpenAI and their ChatGPT project and the impending integration to Microsoft and bots will make huge jumps forward in their uses especially as they can be there when you can’t, like while your customer service team is asleep as well as improving self-service for customers therefore reducing expenses.
Over the next 10-25 years, this technology will continue to make huge advances and will be capable of doing even more of what humans are doing today. It will be smart for customer-facing teams to keep up with bot progress and stay on the cutting edge here to provide increasingly better experiences at increasingly lower costs.
Bots and AI will be a game-changer for customer support where reps spend close to 90% of their time on the job repeating the answers to the same questions and helping customers with the same issues over and over again. And even learning new skill.
6. Self-service will become an absolute necessity.
Since the first time someone wrote a user manual, self-service has existed. And as mentioned above, bots and AI offer new frontiers of self-service.
But more meaningfully, customers and users are changing rapidly, and they expect more self-service avenues than ever before.
to stay ahead of that curve once it arrives — and if you’re already doing customer success at your company now, you’re ahead of the game.
7. Social media will become a standard customer service tool.
Companies will have to adapt their social media accounts to handle customer service situations. Whether this is a messaging service or a dedicated rep, businesses will need to devise a game plan that manages spontaneous social media interactions. This means that social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will become viable options for customers that are looking to submit feedback.
In the past, these mediums wouldn’t even be considered as customer service options. However, as social media continues to open up new outlets for customer reviews, companies will be forced to engage with these consumers on their own online turf.
8. New technology will create new customer service positions.
Some technology will become the catalyst for new customer service positions. For example, augmented reality may pave the way for virtual assistants who can help customers learn how to use products and services. Customers will not only be able to simulate a product, but they’ll also have someone digitally supporting them as they become familiar with its features.
9. Customer service reps will solve fewer problems.
This one sounds bad, but it really isn’t!
With more AI and self-service resources becoming available to customers, customer support will see a decrease in case count. This is because smaller, less-complicated problems will be solved by either the customer or a service technology.
So does that mean you can fire your customer support team? No! Your reps will be able to use this added time to focus on solving more difficult product or service problems. That significantly improves the customer experience because it allows your reps to provide a more personalized interaction. Instead of feeling the pressure of a growing case queue, customer service teams can be more thorough in their work and avoid costly troubleshooting errors.
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