Customer
Service in 2015
As
2014 wound down, I took the time to pause, and look ahead to what top customer
service trends will surface in 2015 and beyond. Good service — whether it's to
answer a customer's question prior to purchase, or help a customer resolve an
issue post-purchase should be pain-free, proactive at a minimum and pre-emptive
at best, deeply personalised, and delivered with maximum productivity.
Here
are 6 top trends - out of a total of 10 - that I am keeping my eye on!
Trend 1: Customers Embrace
Emerging Channels to Reduce Friction.
In
a recent survey, we found that web self-service was the most widely used
communication channel for customer service, surpassing use of the voice channel
for the first time. In 2015, I predict that customers will continue to demand
effortless interactions over web and mobile self-service channels. They will
also explore new communication channels such as video chat with screen sharing
and annotation.
Trend 2: Companies Will
Explore Proactive Engagement.
Proactive
engagements anticipate the what, when, where, and how for customers, and
prioritise information and functionality to speed customer time-to-completion.
In 2015, I expect organisations to explore proactive engagement - whether it's
proactive chat, proactive offers, or proactive content - delivered at the right
time in a customer's pre-purchase journey to help answer customer questions.
They will use learnings from these proactive engagements to improve operational
performance and to predict future customer behaviour.
Trend 3: Insights From
Connected Devices Will Trigger Pre-emptive Service.
Connected
devices are expected to proliferate at a rate of 50 billion by 2020, and the
Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a business reality. Companies are starting
to use support automation to pre-emptively diagnose and fix issues with minimal
human intervention. Pre-emptive service wins on all fronts: faster resolution at
lower costs, deeply personalised engagements, better planning, and anticipation
of future customer needs. In 2015, businesses will focus on realising the
benefits of building and servicing smarter products. But there are barriers:
companies will have to pay a close eye to merging interoperability standards:
device to network connectivity, data messaging formats that work under
constrained network conditions, and data models to aggregate, analyse, and act
on the data.
Trend 4: Knowledge Will
Evolve From Dialog To Cognitive Engagement.
Organisations
will look at ways to reduce the manual overhead of traditional knowledge
management for customer service. They will start to explore cognitive
engagement solutions — interactive computing systems that use artificial
intelligence to collect information, automatically build models of
understanding and inference, and communicate in natural ways. These solutions
have the potential to automate knowledge creation, empower agents with deeply
personalised answers and intelligence, scale a company's knowledge capability,
and uncover new revenue streams by learning about customer needs.
Trend 5: Predictive Analytics
Will Power Offers, Decisions, and Connections.
The
use of decisioning — automatically deciding a customer's or systems next best
action — is pervasive in customer service organisations. Rules drive the
routing of interactions to the right resource and are used to automatically
recommend the right answer to customer questions. In 2015, organisations will
extend the power of predictive analytics to offer service tailored to the
customer's profile, historical data of past interactions and transactions, and
current situational data such as geographic location, device, and browser. They
will use predictive analytics to connect a customer to the right customer
service agent. They will also use it to make better workforce decisions such as
hiring, retention, and employee performance.
Trend 6: The Customer Service
Technology Ecosystem Will Consolidate.
The
customer service process involves a set of complex technologies that fall into
three main software categories. They are: queuing and routing technologies, CRM
customer service technologies, and workforce optimisation technologies. These
three software categories are mature, and leading vendors within each category
offer robust end-to-end solutions in which many capabilities are commoditised.
Today, the complexity of the technology ecosystem affects the quality of
service that can be delivered. I believe that the combination of mature
software categories in which vendors are struggling with growth opportunities,
the rise of robust SaaS solutions in each category, and rising buyer
frustration make for ripe conditions for further consolidation to happen in the
marketplace, putting in question the long-term vendor direction of those who
will be acquired.
by
Grant Stanley 2015
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