6 Ways Technology Will Affect the Future of Customer Service

Service technology is software that assists customer service teams in achieving customer success. These tools improve workflow efficiency and make it easier for companies to provide effective solutions to their customers. Adopting service technology helps companies manage the increasing demand for outstanding customer service. Now that we have that out of the way, let's take a look at how service technology will influence customer service over the next decade.

Customers will expect an omni-channel service experience-

Customers can engage your company through a variety of digital mediums. This increased accessibility will drive the need for omni-channel experiences. Omni-channel support is distinctively different from multichannel support as omni-channel syncs your communication channels together so both your team and your customers can work seamlessly between them. For example, rather than customers having to navigate away from your social media page, your service team can respond to them wherever they're engaging your business. Then, if the problem can't be solved on one communication channel, your reps can easily transfer the case to another medium where they can better support the customer.

Remote work will become more normal-

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 centers, 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 centers. 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.

Bots (and AI) will help professionals, not replace them-

Today, most "bots" aren't actually any form of artificial intelligence. They're branched, piecemeal logic presented in a conversational (like iMessage or Facebook Messenger) user interface (UI). Bots are just a different interaction mode for existing knowledge, and it's another opportunity to engage your customers. Conversational UI is a great way for businesses to make themselves appear on the bleeding edge of innovation. Bots can be there when you can't, like while your customer service team is asleep. Bots can improve self-service for customers, and reduce expenses for vendors, by providing a new, repeatable, and inexpensive method of communications. 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. 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. What about the questions humans answer on the job that require 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. When you think about the inbound service framework we're building, customer support is about engaging with customers reactively, customer service is about guiding them with new suggestions and added value, and customer success is about helping customers grow, and can provide infinite additional value for both the customer and their own company.

Customer service training will be personalized-

Customer service training has traditionally been one-size-fits-all. However, as sentiment analysis tools make it easier to identify each rep's strengths and weaknesses, training will become more tailored to the employee's needs.

Reps who need more time learning the product will be able to master its features, while employees who are more technically savvy will receive training that builds their soft communication skills. To personalize your training, you'll need to survey your team before, during, and after each exercise. Measure their performance and ask for feedback. This will not only build trust with your new reps, but it will also create an onboarding process that's unique to each agent.

Customer success will become a competitive differentiator-

Over the next five years, great customer success will become a critical competitive advantage for companies, just like great customer support is today. The customer success industry, and the progress of companies in search of customer value, is just too fast and effective for this to not happen. Plus, the concepts of customer success are permeating beyond just the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry. It's spreading quickly and growing. When customer success becomes table stakes like customer support is today, it will be an exciting time in the industry of customer success to see the takeover. But when that happens, it'll pose a novel challenge for companies looking to grow their customer list. Successful, established companies will have happier customers on the whole, raising the bar even higher for new entrants, even as switching costs of providers decreases for consumers. Plus, customer success will become an imperative from day one, increasing startup costs and dipping margins for new entrants. It'll be an exciting new set of challenges to stay ahead of that curve once it arrives — and if you're already doing customer success at your company now, you're ahead of the game.

The frontline service rep will be more flexible and empathetic.

New technology is going to empower customer service reps and give them the tools they need to succeed in their role. They'll spend less time worrying about standard operating procedures, and more time focusing on their customers' needs. As a result, customer service personnel will become much more flexible and empathetic. With fewer points of friction in their workflow, they'll have more encouragement to provide above-and-beyond customer service.