Gartner with another interesting one – four key customer service technology trends. Quoting Channel Daily News.
Trend Number One: Technologies that enable reps are bringing the most value to service organizations
Gartner says that employee-centric technologies like workforce management, case management, consolidated desktop agent, internal collaboration tools, and unified communications currently deliver the most value to the customer service function.
These types of technologies focus on performance, monitoring, and development to support day-to-day or intraday flexibility, new operational needs to manage the new work world, and new demands and expectations of customers.
Trend Number Two: The future lies in understanding the preferences and behaviors of digital customers
Gartner’s survey revealed that in the next two years, digital self-service channels like online account portals and mobile applications, as well as predictive customer analytics, are expected to become valuable capabilities for service organizations.
Trend Number Three: CSS leaders expect most gains from data and analytics
Over the next few years, the focus will not only be on analyzing customer data using digital analytics, sentiment analysis, and machine learning, but also taking that data to make informed decisions using the actionable insights, according to CSS leaders.
Trend Number Four: Substantial investments on the horizon in the deployment of AI and chatbots
According to the Gartner Technology Road Survey, trend number four reveals that CSS leaders will invest in VCAs/chatbots and AI in the next several years.
Today, only one in four service organizations are fully deploying these technologies, but 37.5 per cent of CSS leaders are planning to deploy chatbots by 2023, and 36.3 per cent of them are doing the same for AI capabilities.
While I’m on customer service, Propel Software recently conducted a U.S. consumer survey to understand how consumers define brand loyalty in today’s market. More than half of consumers – 54% – said they would stop using a brand after just one bad experience. The news is worse if your target market is millennials: 57% will abandon your brand
Why do we care?
Thematically, it’s about digital. How much can an organization increase the value of the customer experience using tools. It all seems a touch obvious… and that’s the danger. The obvious stuff is often assumed and can be under-invested. Because turns out the customer — particularly the younger one — has little patience for bad experiences.