The Future Of Customer Support
The world is changing at a fast pace with each year that passes; and the same goes for the future of customer support. From development in technology to AI and chatbots becoming the new norm, customer support is changing for better scalability, workforce efficiency and unified communications. Read on to discover what’s in store for the future of customer support.
Technology
Unsurprisingly, technology is going to play a big role in influencing customer service into the future. There has been a huge shift in how businesses are able to contact their customers in recent years and this is going to keep evolving.
Social Media
Social media platforms have grown significantly over the past decade. These channels are becoming increasingly influential for businesses to not only promote their products or services, but also allows them to reach out to their customers directly via multiple channels.
Social channels also work conversely in terms of the customers reaching out to the businesses rather than the other way round. It gives the customer a louder voice to be heard when they are happy or upset with the company. This form of communication is a much faster way to communicate with customers in comparison to traditional email queries.
Integrating Unified Communications and Social Media
Customer service companies aren’t just using social media to communicate with their customers – they are starting to integrate social media with a unified communications platform to help with the communication between team members, too.
Companies are identifying new ways to work in tandem with social networking sites that users are already familiar with. These services come with presence availability, mobile friendliness and voice calling features that are all set in a familiar setting and interface; this makes things easier for the employees to get used to these new services.
Video Calls will Increase
Eye contact improves relationships and facilitates openness; this is important to create trust with customers and get a full understanding of what their query is. Non-video, voice conversations will slowly fade out and video calls will come in to help customer service become a little more human with technology. Communication platforms such as Microsoft Teams will become essential to the way companies communicate internally as well as externally in the future.
AI can Improve Efficiency
Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help to solve problems that have an easy-to-predict solution. By automating customer service for the majority of requests, this allows a company’s human workforce to dedicate more time to queries that require more of a human touch. For instance, chatbots are becoming more popular on websites as they can mimic written or spoken human speech to converse and interact with customers.
Customer Relationships and AI
Human-to-human connections will become the main focus for the future of customer support – and AI will have a big part to play in this. AI can help to understand people’s emotions through their facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice.
Some support desks ask customers to self-report their feelings either through a list or smiley face icons. The issue with these methods is that self-reporting can be unreliable and choosing smiley faces can be primitive.
However, AI and video calls can eliminate these flaws. These can give customer service teams a physical presence, a tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures to help them make a human connection with the customer and allow them to gauge an appropriate response to the query.
Remote Working
The future of customer support will not only push customers online, but it will also push customer service team members online, too. The development of technology and living in a Covid world has allowed these team members to work efficiently from the comfort of their own homes, meaning confined call centres are no longer a necessity.
Want to find out more?
It’s clear to see that the future of customer support is evolving all the time, with most services moving online. If you would like to find out more about how we can help future-proof your customer support, get in touch with our team of experts on 0345 241 1521, or email info@intuitycomms.com today.
