According to multiple surveys, more than 70% of customers have reached peak tolerance to bad customer service, while over 80% of younger generations vowed to take their business elsewhere if a customer service team takes too long to reply to their queries. An unhappy customer means not only lost revenue but bad press too.
Hopefully, modern-day technologies can shape the future of customer service in ways that can keep both businesses and their customers satisfied. Here are just a handful of these technology-driven approaches.
More data-driven decisions
Latest customer service technologies can enable businesses to assess the success of their initiatives and campaigns. Customer service teams can analyze the various data on customer interactions to identify their customer base’s real needs and wants and detect any issues that might hamper a seamless customer experience. Sales teams could also use the data in their decision-making process to boost sales and leads.
More face-to-face video interaction
Computer apps like Zoom, Loom, and MS Teams will quickly replace email and voice-only conversations with their customers. Face-to-face communication can be a powerful customer service strategy to boost a consumer’s trust in your brand and show them that you respect and care about them.
The omnichannel approach
Businesses using omnichannel to streamline customer purchase experience are multiple steps ahead of their competitors. Omnichannel is one of the latest marketing trends you might need to pay attention to.
Omnichannel uses technology to offer customers an enhanced customer experience by integrating all the channels they are shopping from, be it their smartphone, home computer, and a real-world store. It is estimated that just 27 percent of customers use a single channel for shopping.
Omnichannel is so great because it is not limited to a customer’s experience on a single channel. Since it uses data on purchases made across multiple channels with a focus on the client, not the business, it can help sales and customer service teams come with solutions that are properly tailored to specific customers, slashing the risk of unhappy or overlooked customers.
For instance, with an omnichannel approach, as a customer service specialist, you will be able to provide customer support wherever your customer interacts with your business. If they send a customer inquiry via social media, you will be able to reply on that particular channel without having to force the customer to log into a different channel like their email client.
The only downside of an omnichannel approach is that any mistakes done in a channel will have ripple effects across all channels, eroding the customer experience sometimes irreversibly.
AI-powered chatbots
Current customer service chatbots make use of AI advances like deep learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to answer standard customer inquiries just like a human customer service rep would. But unlike a human operator, these AI-powered bots are available 24/7, offer nearly instant responses, and possess endless patience even with some of the most nerve-racking customers. And if the customer query is too complex, they can forward it to a human operator.
What is more, thanks to human artificial intelligence advances, some AI chatbots can be so human-like that it is hard to tell them from a real person. It is estimated that 27% of customers that have interacted with a chatbot had no idea that they talked to a computer program.
Chatbots can also gather precious customer data to further enhance customer experience and tailor customer support solutions that best match a customer base. Conversational chatbots are increasingly embedded into messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Slack by businesses to offer top-of-the-line customer support on channels customers are best accustomed to.