10 Ways How Technology Affects the Future of Customer Service

Modern technologies are developing daily and being incorporated into different fields, and customer service is one of those spheres. They not only ease employees’ lives but also help them reach their goals quickly and productively.

However, new technologies are challenging too. It takes time to learn to use and adapt to new technologies. To eliminate this hurdle, consider organizing effective training for your employees to teach them modern tools and technologies they can integrate into their jobs. 

Besides, not all businesses can afford them having new technologies. Last but not least, we all question if technologies will replace humans. Luckily, no. They are not going to replace but to help workers to do their jobs more efficiently. 

Read this blog post to get to know some of the predictions about the future of service technology and how it will affect your daily work and career.

10 Ways Technology Is Going to Impact Customer Service

1. Omni-Channel Customer Service

To avoid making customers wait for your response, you should manage all communications under one platform. Omnichannel support enables the integration of both offline and online contact channels.

Providing people with constant excellent customer experience can eventually improve customer retention and the quality of customer support and ease the accessibility of your brand to your customers. 

For example, customers having queries don’t have to navigate away from your Instagram; your team can respond to them wherever they are. Then, suppose your team cannot solve the issue on a specific communication channel.

In that case, your colleagues can easily transfer the case to another communication platform where your teammates can provide customers with better support.

To do this, you'll need omnichannel helpdesk software for virtual assistants to manage all interactions easily, fast, and effectively.  In this way, your customer support agents will use the same platform to communicate with your customers regardless of where the interaction started first.

2. Remote Work

In the future, customer support agents might also work remotely. Rather than working at offices or call centers, customer support specialists will be equipped with more tools to work from home. 

Many communication channels, including email, chatbots, and social media, can be easily accessed from home. Customer support agents can use them via any device, even from a smartphone. Besides, there are many cloud-based phone systems that allow you to work from home. 

Once businesses realize how much they save on office spaces, it'll become much more common for customer support agents to work remotely.

3. Bots And AI

Chatbots are crucial for customer service as they provide 24/7 support to customers. With chatbots, you can provide customers with more personalized customer support backed by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It is cost-effective and highly efficient. It is not about bots that give ready-made answers but chatbots that can respond like people.

This doesn’t mean that humans are going to lose their jobs. Not all customers want to solve their issues with a bot. Moreover, in some cases, human interaction is needed because bots cannot solve all tickets.

Bots are highly useful when it comes to answering repetitive questions. It is a tedious job that no single customer support agent would like to do every day. So, you can freely assign this task to a bot and leave complex and more serious tasks to your team. 

4. Social Media

It is well-known that social media is a powerful tool for building your business. For instance, Facebook has 2.93 monthly active users, and Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users.  With so many users, businesses are able to reach a vast number of potential customers.

Most users prefer to use social media over other methods to communicate with businesses. No one wants to wait hours to get a response. That’s why customers expect companies to do their customer service via social media platforms to receive immediate assistance.

Social media can help you increase your brand reputation by providing clients with excellent customer service. You will be able to win the trust and loyalty of your audience, as they will think of you as a business that takes care of its customers.

So, having Instagram on the desktop is a must for your employees in order to communicate with customers easily and effectively. The demand for messaging apps is growing and customers are also becoming more demanding.

5. Self-Service

Not all queries should be solved by customer service representatives. For smaller or less complex issues, you can take advantage of the technology or can assist clients with proper guidance.

Why is self-service becoming increasingly popular? When starting an online business, you should keep in mind that at some point, you will need self-service to work more productively. Most big businesses make use of self-service as it is cost-friendly.

You don’t need to hire many support agents to deal with a huge flow of simple and repetitive queries that can be solved by customers too. So, you will be able to concentrate on major issues and improve them.

Self-service is great also because it allows your customers to take part in the process of finding answers by themselves. They feel empowered as they are capable of resolving issues instead of waiting for a busy customer support agent to pick up the phone or respond in a live chat.

6. Voice-Based Online Assistants

Voice-based assistants are becoming increasingly popular in various fields. Many businesses incorporate voice support into their customer service to meet client's needs and demands better.

Voice assistants are cool as they

• Provide clients with more personalized conversations. You can learn a lot about customers’ needs, interests, and behaviors with AI tools. Once you have this data, voice assistants can make relevant offers.  

• Reduce wait time: Voice assistants can handle multiple queries at once and without making customers wait for a long time.

• Enhance the first contact resolution rate (FCR): By improving your voice assistance, you will be able to better the FCR rate by handling queries more effectively.

• Increase brand exposure: If you make a logo or fancy website, and think it is enough to increase your brand awareness and improve your brand reputation, then you are very mistaken. You should prove to your customers that it is worth buying your products and services by providing them with excellent customer support. Voice support can definitely make customers’ experience smoother and better.

7. Data-Driven Customer Service Decisions

Data is crucial for any business that wants to make further improvements in customer support. Your team should always have data of all customer interactions to analyze, and understand customers’ needs, demands, and behaviors. 

One way to gather this data is by asking customers to participate in surveys and other types of customer feedback. In this way, the support team will be able to identify the pain points of their target market and what works well.

Data analytics allows businesses to get a complete view of their customers. Thanks to that information, you can improve your relationships with them.

8. More Video Communication

Nowadays, many customers prefer to handle their issues via video chat. They allow support agents to have a more personal approach to customers’ issues and give instant responses. Besides, you can build a strong bond with customers due to which they will keep coming back and be sure that your support team is there to help them with any issue.

9. Real-Time Messaging Will Outpace Email

Customers expect support agents to be online. This means they would prefer to get assistance by real-time messaging rather than calling or communicating via email. There are many communication mediums for real-time messaging such as Facebook Messenger. You can choose a platform that best suits your company’s working style.

10. Blockchain Is There Too

Blockchains will be highly beneficial to customer service in the future. With blockchains, businesses can get information about their products in a single place for records. More specifically, they can retrieve information about the manufacturing date, product details, technical specifications, and ownership details.

Let’s imagine a situation when a customer signed a contract with a specific company to receive some services, but the company failed to provide the customer with the services he/she needed by the specific date. 

To avoid wasting a lot of time on compensation procedures, blockchain has smart contacts, and customers can make use of them. Smart contracts assume that all parties have contractual obligations, and if something goes wrong, relevant action will be automatically taken.

Moreover, blockchain is highly transparent. It is a great advantage as transparency allows customers to build trust in your company. And when we say transparency, we mean that customers are able to see any blockchain-related activity related to them. 

You can easily introduce blockchain in your workplace, instead of using centralized cloud storage like Google Drive or Amazon Drive, you can choose blockchain-based cloud storage to manage your business data.

Wrapping things up

The above-mentioned predictions about customer service are not far away. Businesses are making significant steps to be more prepared for the new changes. Where does your company stand?

Remember. When you have better customer support, it gives you a competitive privilege and takes your business to the next level.