Gartner: These Three Technologies Will Transform Customer Service By 2028

The analyst has predicted the three most transformative customer service technologies by 2028

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Contact CenterInsights

Published: September 4, 2023

James Stephen

Gartner has uncovered three technologies that it believes will have the biggest impact on contact centers by 2028.

The U.S.-based research and consultancy firm has revealed these transformational technologies to be generative AI, digital customer service, and conversational user interfaces.

The findings came to light through the Gartner Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2023 report, which seeks out critical, new technologies for its supporting customers.

Drew Kraus, VP Analyst in the Gartner Customer Service and Support practice, provided his interpretation of the report in no uncertain words: “The common theme of these three technologies is their ability to streamline the customer journey and enable customer service leaders to meet customers’ growing expectations.

 Within the next five years, we expect these technologies to change the face of customer service and support.

Generative AI

Gartner has predicted that 80 percent of customer service and support organizations will be using some form of generative AI technology to bolster agent productivity and customer experience (CX) by 2025.

It currently places Generative AI at the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ but sees the technology moving through the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’, onto the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’, and finally ending up on the ‘Plateau of Productivity’.

Currently, the only technology occupying a space on the final ‘plateau’ is CCaaS.

Generative AI will mostly be used for content creation, AI-supported chatbots, and automation of human work. The biggest impact it is likely to have is on customer experience, the report finds.

A Gartner poll also found that 38 percent of leaders are seeing improvements in customer experience and retention as the main reason to deploy large language model (LLM) applications.

Kraus commented on the findings related to generative AI: “The impact of AI on the customer service function cannot be overstated.

Not only do we expect organizations to replace 20-30% of their agents with generative AI, but also anticipate it creating new jobs to implement such capabilities.

Digital Customer Service

With the introduction of so many digital engagement options for customers, expectations have been raised to a record high.

Adding more channels can also have the effect of increasing the overall effort required for customers as they may end up using multiple channels for a single purpose.

Digital customer service offerings work towards seamless conversation orchestration.

Most of these offerings have evolved, according to Gartner, following the addition of conversational AI to self-service.

Kraus gave his assessment of the technology: “Digital customer service will transform customer experience outcomes by reducing friction and eliminating unnecessary customer effort.

By creating a seamless customer experience, this technology will reduce churn and enhance customer satisfaction.

Conversational User Interfaces

Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) are human-computer interfaces that support natural language interactions for fulfilling requests, like answering questions or completing tasks.

CUIs give direct control to customer service agents over the applications they are using.

When they are implemented to provide automated support through chatbots, it enhances customer experience and self-service adoption.

Kraus spoke about CUIs in the report: “Customers increasingly expect to be able to interact with the applications they use in a natural way, and this has been accelerated by the emergence of large language model-enabled enterprise applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft 365 CoPilot.

CUIs will be vital for driving efficiency and meeting customers’ changing expectations.

Elsewhere, Gartner revealed its 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS, which provides a ‘who’s who’ directory of the biggest CCaaS companies around.

CX Today’s Charlie Mitchell discussed this year’s Magic Quadrant results for CCaaS with industry experts Dave Michels, Lead Analyst at TalkingPointz, and Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.

 

 

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