Customer values and priorities are shifting. Today, having a great product is no longer enough. As new technologies continue to emerge and shape the way we interact with products and each other, customer expectations have changed. According to the 2019 State of Service report by Salesforce, 80% of customers now consider experience with a company to be as important as its products. It is now more critical than ever for businesses to look inward and identify how they can transform the service being provided within their contact centres in order to outpace their competition and build brand loyalty.
For support agents and managers, intelligent and data-driven customer support platforms provide the context and automation needed to keep pace with customers, increase agent effectiveness, and drive satisfaction. However, that is only half of the equation. Today, the number of touchpoints and channels customers are steadily increasing. Empowering customers to leverage their smartphones and devices helps streamline, personalise, and enhance their experience.
Playing Catch-Up to the Customer
With all their powerful built-in features, smartphones are essentially supercomputers in the palm of your hand. So it comes as no surprise that they have become the go-to source for how customers connect to the products and brands they love. As customers manoeuvre between email, voice, text, video, and more, the expectations they have stays the same. Yet while customers are moving from channel-to-channel with ease, many support teams are only focusing on just a few. According to the same report by Salesforce, 82% of customers are using mobile apps as a communications channel compared to 51% of support teams. In another Salesforce study two-thirds of millennials identified mobile apps as their preferred channel when communicating with companies.
It’s clear that smartphones, and specifically mobile apps are where your customers are, however, a substantial number of businesses have yet to realise the significance mobile apps play in the overall customer journey, and that optimising for in-app support can reshape the customer experience.
The Role of AI and Automation
There are lots of misconceptions around the adoption of AI and automation within the contact centre, the most common being that with AI, the entire support experience will become automated. In reality, the role of AI in customer support will actually benefit agents, allowing them to find resolutions quicker and focus on more specialised skills and tasks. By leveraging AI and data-driven insights that are available on your customers such as purchase history, previous support interactions, and agent staffing and expertise, all can help to intelligently route calls and interactions to the best agent available in order to solve issues quicker. AI can also help automate the mundane, repetitive tasks that agents are typically bogged down with, freeing up their time to focus on more specialised tasks and assignments that require the human touch. The role of AI in customer support is still being defined, but one thing is clear, it will be vital in shaping the future of the contact centre.
There are two major trends defining the future of customer support. Customers want to use their smartphones and apps when communicating with companies, and support teams want to leverage AI and emerging technologies to empower their agents to find resolutions quicker. It’s clear that the future of the customer experience lies at the intersection of the smartphone and AI.
Guest Blog by Anand Janefalkar, Founder and CEO, UJET
As Founder and CEO of UJET, Inc., Anand Janefalkar has 15 years of experience in the technology industry and has served as a technical advisor for various startups in the Bay Area. Before founding UJET, he served as Senior Engineering Manager at Jawbone, and also previously contributed to multiple high-profile projects at Motorola.
