9 Customer Service Technology Trends You Can’t Miss Out on
Table of contents
Customers today expect it all. Quick replies. Omnichannel support. Personalized approach. Even if one is missing, they would seriously consider shifting to your competitor.
Thankfully, the opposite also holds true. Customers keep coming back to companies that deliver exceptional customer service.
Take this story narrated by Shep Hyken, CX expert, in Hiver’s podcast.
A woman called Microsoft for customer support. She talked to a gentleman who was so helpful that she actually called back with a follow-up question and said, “Is this guy still available? I don’t know his last name but his first name was William.” The person was actually Bill Gates pretending to be William. He was taking customer support calls so he could better understand what problems customers were having.
Moral of the story–people want and remember great experiences.
But in today’s time, with small customer service teams and probably thousands of customers, providing such experiences without help is a recipe for disaster.
That’s where customer service technology comes into the picture.
Below we talk about 9 customer service technology trends and how you can use them to provide great customer service.
Table of Contents
- 1. A Much-Needed Rise in Omnichannel Support
- 2. AI in Customer Service Will Become the New Reality
- 3. Application of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
- 4. Need for Powerful Self-Service Options
- 5. Advanced Analytics for Data-Driven Customer Service Decisions
- 6. Adoption of Conversational Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
- 7. Emphasis on Customer Feedback Tools
- 8. Social Media As a Customer Service Channel
- 9. Focus on Data Privacy and Protection
- Get Ready for The New Generation of Customer Service Technology
1. A Much-Needed Rise in Omnichannel Support
I recently wanted to adjust my notification preferences in Slack. I didn’t have to go to the website to find the steps. Because Slack made it easy for me to find the support I needed in the tool itself.
While I could take the steps I needed, Slack also made it easy for me to contact the team from the app.
Every customer is looking for the same experience. They want the help they need on their preferred channel. This could mean email, social media, calls, in-app, or WhatsApp.
But how do your customer reps keep track of these hundreds of interactions happening in different places? What if your customer shifts from one channel to the other? You don’t want to annoy the customer even more by rehashing the same information on WhatsApp and then email.
Multi-channel help desk technology thus becomes the need of the hour. Hiver gathers and lets you take action on all customer interactions across different channels in one place – your inbox.
2. AI in Customer Service Will Become the New Reality
AI has brought major changes in every industry. The same holds for customer service. According to our recent survey report – “AI Vs Human: The Future of Customer Service,” only 13% think AI’s role in customer support will eventually diminish.
What Shep Hyken says, I believe a lot of customer service professionals would agree with –
“AI can answer a lot of questions. It could streamline the process. It could make it easier for customers to get their information. It will leave our reps able to take care of customers facing deeper, more complicated issues. I don’t think AI will ever replace the customer support world, at least not in the near future. But it’s going to support the agents.”
The best part is that AI has many use cases in customer service. For example, it can provide intelligent email suggestions for queries.
You can speed up query response time and deliver personalized support within seconds.
If you want more inspiration, here are some AI applications you can check out.
3. Application of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
I came across this interesting use case of augmented reality (AR) in restaurants. It shows how servers can use AR-enabled glasses to search through information and provide quick answers to customer questions.
While this is a use case best fitted to restaurants, here are some other applications of AR and VR that you can explore:
- Virtual try-ons and fittings: AR mirrors and apps can let customers try on clothes, accessories, and makeup products.
- Remote assistance: You can use AR-powered apps to relay instructions or annotations on customers’ live camera feeds to help visually guide them.
- Product demonstrations and walkthroughs: Companies can use AR/VR to let customers experience the product’s features and UI in a more engaging, hands-on way compared to traditional video demos.
- Immersive training for agents: Help customer service agents deal with complex scenarios by using VR simulations to provide hands-on training
4. Need for Powerful Self-Service Options
According to a survey, clients can see an average increase of 45% in CSAT by adopting self-service options. Think about it. Why would you wait to have a customer agent solve your problem when you can get it done on your own in a few minutes?
While companies have adopted chatbots, FAQs, and knowledge desks, these options will need to be more powerful.
For example, just a month back, I was trying to create a content bank of ideas for my articles. I decided to explore Slite for that. Before getting started, I went through their helpdesk. What made my experience smooth?
They had an easy search function. Moreover, they had an AI-enabled feature called “Ask” where I could ask any question and get it answered.
This is what customers will demand from you moving forward. Not just a self-service option for the sake of it. But one backed with technology that makes it quick and easy to find information and solve problems instantly.
5. Advanced Analytics for Data-Driven Customer Service Decisions
Decisions based on gut will be a thing of the past when it comes to customer service. Companies will track and measure customer data at each step to optimize customer service and consistently build great experiences.
This calls for tools that make data capture easier and provide that data in metrics that are easy to track.
For example, you can quickly review Hiver’s dashboard to see key customer service metrics, such as average first response time and resolution violations.
Based on this data, you can make important decisions. Let’s say your ecommerce store’s average first response time increases drastically during the holiday season. You can easily compare it with active conversations and determine if your team is overburdened. Based on this data, you can make quick decisions like hiring part-time reps or using AI to resolve simpler queries so only the complex ones reach your team.
6. Adoption of Conversational Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Conversational IVR is a system that interacts with customers through natural language conversations over the phone. In simpler words, it means handling customer interactions without an agent.
Ruben Harris, the CEO of OutRival, talks about this customer service technology trend, “After building customer experience teams and making thousands of calls ourselves, we have learned that personalized relationships result in more enrollments, appointments, and conversions for businesses. Personalized relationships are created by people but…. if people are augmented by technology, they can turn every touch point into a competitive advantage.”
Tools like OutRival take set workflows and customer profiles into consideration while forming these responses.
Our take on it? This could be the future of customer service. While it will not eliminate agents, this customer service technology will definitely handle basic queries and route the complex ones to agents. The result? Reduced costs, smaller but effective teams, and higher productivity.
7. Emphasis on Customer Feedback Tools
Shep Hyken talked about the perils of delivering an average experience in our podcast –
“Almost 4 out of 5 customers would switch if they knew there was somewhere else to go that was better. If all you’re doing is actually delivering an average experience, guess what happens? You are at huge risk. They are not going to complain about something that was just okay because it wasn’t bad… But it wasn’t that good either. Average is not good enough.”
If you don’t know about this average customer service at your organization, how are you even going to improve it?
Customer feedback tools will thus become a priority.
These tools help you measure key metrics like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score). With Hiver, you can create simple customer surveys that can be inserted into emails with a click. Once inserted, you will get real-time reports on how many customers filled the form, your CSAT, and a comparison of team members’ performance.
8. Social Media As a Customer Service Channel
As an angry customer, I have often been tempted to go on LinkedIn or X to talk about a bad hotel experience or an improperly delivered package. Search “bad customer service” on these platforms, and you’ll find hundreds like me.
Customers increasingly expect brands to respond to their posts and help them with solutions. This has also been a result of brands adopting social commerce. For example, if I am ordering a product through a shoppable post and facing an issue, I won’t go to the website to find their email. I will just quickly DM the page or leave a comment.
How can customer service technology help you in this?
Adopt social listening tools. These tools can quickly show you posts that mention keywords like “[Brand Name] bad customer service” or “[Brand Name] require support”. You can then have your agents respond to these posts and quickly solve their problems.
Look at this example from Amazon.
It gets three things right:
- Starts with an empathetic statement.
- Provides a link instead of asking the customer to go through 2-3 steps to reach their team.
- Ends the reply with the agent’s name to make it feel like there’s an actual human waiting to resolve the issue.
9. Focus on Data Privacy and Protection
Businesses today have access to a lot of customer information. Be it their address details, phone numbers, or purchase history. With the rising number of cybercrimes, customers are wary of sharing their information.
To assure customers that their data will remain safe and private, here are three customer service technology trends that will become important:
- Data encryption: Many customer service platforms secure data with encryption during transmission and storage. This ensures that intercepted data remains unreadable without decryption keys.
- Data masking and redaction: Advanced customer service software can automatically mask or redact sensitive information, such as credit card or social security numbers. This allows agents to assist with issues without directly accessing or viewing sensitive data.
- Automated data management: AI-driven customer service platforms can manage data more securely by automating data classification, retention, and deletion policies. For example, systems can automatically delete personally identifiable information (PII) after a certain period, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR or CCPA.
Get Ready for The New Generation of Customer Service Technology
Customer expectations are a lot different than what they were a few years ago. One major reason is there’s a lot of competition, and every brand is trying its best to make customer experience a differentiator.
In such a scenario, you have to be at your best every time a customer comes up to you. And you need customer service technology to help you each step of the way.
Whether you adopt customer service technology trends like AI or use customer service tools like Hiver, your end goal should be to make it easy for customers to do business with you.
