7 ways tech is changing customer service in businesses

#CSWeek2020: 7 ways tech is changing customer service in businesses

They say, that the customer is king for any business to flourish!

How you handle your customers’ issues will determine if they will come back tomorrow or even refer to others. Your customer service skills and techniques drive and keep your customers. As thousands of companies across the world celebrate Customer Service Week in different ways

Customer Service Week is an international celebration of the importance of customer service and of the people who serve and support customers on a daily basis.

Each year, They represent leading financial, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, retailing, hospitality, communications, not-for-profit, and educational organizations, as well as government agencies, and others.

Just like any other department in an organisation, customer service has also been disrupted by technology. There’s a lot of excitement about new technology in customer service, support, and success.

The progress of video, real-time messaging, chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrencies, self-service, and even customer success itself, all present the potential for big changes in the day-to-day workings of customer success practitioners.

While this has a downside as most people fear that they might lose jobs due to these technologies, it’s clear that most new technologies will only serve to help customer-facing professionals to do their jobs more efficiently.

As the world marks the #CSWeek2020, here are a few ways we think the customer service is and will continue changing in businesses thanks to technology:

Bots and AI will help improve customer service

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.

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.

What about the question’s humans answer on the job that requires judgment? Machines can learn, train, and teach, too. In the future, reps will only have to deal with edge cases where bots can’t answer questions with the help of a knowledge base or a past history of customer questions. Once you make support content public in a knowledge base, a bot can learn and deliver that information again and again when customers ask for it.

Customer service decisions will be more data-driven

No matter which service technology you choose, it should include a way to quantitatively measure its success. Without that, there’s no way to prove if the added software is being effective. So, as companies continue to adopt service technology, their customer service teams will become much more dependent on analyzing the success of these programs.

With that shift, there should be a noticeable influx of valuable data circulating throughout customer service departments. Service technology records a variety of information about customer interactions which are used to identify overlooked customer needs or roadblocks. Customer support and success teams then utilize this data to improve the customer’s experience.

Additionally, marketing and sales teams will be interested in this information because they can apply it to their initiatives as well. Marketing teams will use these insights to highlight new roadblocks and record them in the customer’s journey map, like the one below.

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.

We know that eye contact improves relationships and facilitates openness, so the 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.

Customers will appreciate Real-time messaging

Just like video, customers expect you to be always on and most of them prefer to interact using chat than phone or email. Platforms like Facebook Messenger and Slack have pushed us ahead! Now, you can converse with businesses in real-time, and Facebook will even show you their average responsiveness.

This expectation of real-time messaging and responsiveness seeps into other media, too. In future your customers will expect that on-site conversations and chat will be real-time, 1:1, and authentic.

The world operates in synchronous time now — so that means you need to ramp 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.

Remote work will become more normal

COVID19 has literally shown the growth of remote working. The future of customer service will not only push customers online, but it’ll move service reps there, too.

Rather than being confined to call centres, service reps 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.

And, most service channels can already be used outside offices and call centres. Email, live chat, and social media can even be operated from a smartphone and most business phone services offer cloud-based solutions that allow you to work from home.

As businesses see the potential savings of reducing office space, it’ll become much more common for service reps to work remotely.

Social media will make things public

As most people now know, what’s said on social media will remain visible for the world to see. If you’re prepared to offer a first-class customer service experience, this is something you can use to your advantage. With businesses around the world using Twitter and Facebook to answer customer questions publicly, it’s time for smaller organisations to get in on the action too.

Using social media as a customer service tool allows you to show your business’ best side. And the chances are, customers will try to reach out to you using your handles anyway. Trying to shift their query into a private domain may not give the best impression to prospective customers. In contrast, answering questions openly and with a customer-friendly voice will improve your public image.

Social media also makes it easier for your customers to access your team on the go. Providing they have the right app on their smartphone, they can reach you. By giving them a response, you retain a little control over the process.

Self-service will continue to grow

Not all customer service queries require a human response. More businesses are using self-service customer support than ever. Usually, self-service involves creating a detailed FAQ section that customers can search through. Depending on the query they’re making, they may be able to access tutorials or automated responses that guide them through their problem.

The aim of self-service is to reduce the length of time customers spend waiting for a call. It’s particularly advantageous for those who work long hours or who do shift work. With self-service, customers can resolve their problems in the dead of night, on the train, or even while they’re in the bath.

With this in mind, maybe it is time you started investing in these technologies to ensure that you keep your customers. Maybe the implementation of technology into your companies customer service realm will end up being your transformation story.