10 Ways Technology Will Affect the Future of Customer Service

Technologies are finding a way into every aspect of the business. One of the areas that benefit the most is customer service.

Customer service has the power to propel a company’s growth or destroy relationships with customers. During the last few years, service technology has become even more popular.

What is service technology?

Service technology is software that a customer service team uses in their work to ensure customer success. Such tools improve the workflow and reduce the workload on employees.

It’s possible to use ready-made software or opt for custom software development. If you prefer the latter options, a company like MLSDev lists what software development services you can get on the page of custom software development.

Let’s investigate some technologies that are already changing customer service.

1. Video Communication

Face-to-face communication felicitates relationships with current and potential customers. Companies are using this type of communication for demoing products, onboarding new customers, or helping resolve issues.

The importance of video calls with customers can’t be overestimated. It’s a powerful tool that can help build a trustworthy relationship with customers and show that your team values all clients and goes out of the way to provide assistance.

2. Omnichannel Customer Service

Customers can interact with your business across different mediums. For example, they can visit your website, social media pages, or even brick-and-mortar stores if you sell products offline. A company needs to be prepared to provide support services at any of these places.

For example, if a customer is browsing a social media page and seeking help, don’t send them away to your website. The team should be able to provide such services right on social media. In case some issue can’t be resolved there, you need to have the ability to transfer the case to another medium where they can get the needed assistance.

3. Real-Time Messaging

Email is not enough today for efficient customer service. In addition to email, consider adding real-time messaging solutions to your communication tools.

Real-time chats will do the job. However, it’s important to understand that customers expect you to be present at any time of day and night. Chatbots can take on the part of the workload and provide automatic answers to some common questions, even outside your office hours.

Facebook Messenger also provides the ability for real-time messaging, allowing to interact with customers on the most popular social media. Facebook pages also show how much time it takes for a company to answer on average.

4. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is actively finding its way into customer support services. One of the most vivid examples is chatbots. Integration with artificial intelligence makes bots more efficient, as they can select the best answers based on user-input questions and improve the provided service as time goes on.

5. Self-Service

Not all customers prefer to interact with the support team. A lot of them prefer finding answers to their questions themselves. That’s why you need to provide self-service solutions for this group of customers.

Self-service solutions include FAQs, knowledge bases, online forums and communities, and anything else that provides information about your services or products, how to use them, and how to solve problems that might arise. Materials for self-service reduce the number of inquiries to a customer support team, allowing employees to provide better services to those clients that prefer this method.

6. Social Media

We are used to seeing social media as a marketing domain. Today, such a belief is wrong.

Social media is fighting for its place among customer service domains. Many companies, like Shopify and Hubspot, have their own accounts on Twitter where customers can seek help. Many more are to adopt this trend in the foreseeable future to have the ability to interact with customers in the domain of their choice.

7. Growth of Analytics

The customer support team gets a lot of data providing insights into what customers think about your product or service, what problems they have, and what improvements they are waiting for. This data is valuable for making data-driven decisions regarding your company’s future growth, development of new features, and so on. As well, analytics allows you to make the right investment decisions; for instance, in crypto trading, follow the link for more information. 

As time goes on, the importance of a robust analytics system will only grow. They are a valuable asset when it comes to ensuring customer success and the high performance of the client support team. 

8. Speech Analytics Technologies

Modern analytics systems don’t have the needed functionality to recognize speech, collect and analyze data. It means that you don’t have insights into a valuable part of interactions with customers since customer support specialists might not have enough time to put all the data into your support system manually.

In the following years, speech analytics technologies will become a new normal in business. Such technologies will automatically identify why customers are calling and what questions they are asking. Analytics will also provide insight into the efficiency of scripts your customer support specialists are using and how you can improve them to reduce the time spent on voice calls. 

9. Personalized Customer Service Training

One-size-fits-all training programs for customer service representatives will be soon far gone. With the help of analytics tools, it’s possible to identify the strong and weak points of each employee. For example, some employees might need training on communication while others might need more time to learn your product.

Training tailored to their specific needs will result in more efficient customer service and better results.

10. Augmented Reality

The future when virtual assistants will explain to customers how to use a product or service is not so distant as some might think. Augmented reality is the technology that can take customer service to a new level. Customers will be able to interact with a simulated product and get assistance as they are exploring its features. 

To Sum Things Up

Technology is closely interwoven with customer service. Everything indicated that the importance of technological appliances would increase several-fold very soon.

Diversifying customer service channels, adjusting to the changes in customer behavior, and adopting new technological solutions are the main methods that boost the efficiency of customer service and drive customer success.