A whole lot of IOT. Machine learning can improve most user experiences. Data defines your customer experience. Smart diagnostics. Mobile everything.
Among many other popular proclamations, these are some meaty concepts that have been trending strongly in 2017. It is important to our team to create a platform for further investigation into the repercussions of these increasingly integrated technologies and how they serve our people, our business, and the relationships that make doing what we do possible.
Surely we can all agree, the customer service landscape has been changing at light speed for quite some time now. As a technology driven internet company, we consider the relationships with our clients and partners to be the utmost important. It is fascinating what emerging technologies are already doing to disrupt the classic human to human interaction historically known as just “doing good business.” Maybe it meant belonging to the BBB (for the record we are an A+ accredited business). These advancements offer an abundance of opportunity, as well as pose the very real question of how customer service will be conducted in the future.
Imagine you walk into a restaurant and no-one ever comes to your table to take your order. Instead, a tablet or animated device is used for you to interact with an automated ‘customer service’ portal. This ‘bot’ makes suggestions, answers basic questions, modifying lists and forms of information. Ultimately, this artificially intelligent system processes your order, and onto the next stage life goes. Perhaps you have even experienced this already.
Other types of bots, chat interfaces and consumer facing engagements are increasingly taking the place of human to human interaction. Our team in South Austin really attributes our success to the relationships that we have built with our clients. We are excited about what this evolving customer service landscape has to offer, but admittedly skeptical about how these types of systems could help or hurt the quality of the interaction that we have with our clients. Perhaps chat automations can and will help resolve customer support issues more quickly. However, the presence of ‘no representative is currently available at this time’ has become rampant among many service industry organizations. Maintaining a reliable, personable, effective contact with every business associate is pivotal to their growth and advancement.
It seems as though everywhere we look, there is another type of commotion about evolved tech integrations doing this or that. Recently, for Fast Company - Robert Coombs wrote an article titled “I built a bot to apply to thousands of jobs at once - here’s what I learned.” This type of material really starts to make us wonder, how could a job-application machine actually be better than humans are at analyzing and assessing which new hire candidates are most suitable for an initial interview? As we look to help our clients find success and in turn expand our own team, these types of growing platforms should be an important ongoing conversation, at a minimum.
The robots are “applicant tracking systems” (ATS), commonly used tools for sorting job applications. They automatically filter out candidates based on keywords, skills, former employers, years of experience, schools attended, and the like.
Now, let’s cut to the chase for a second, we all know the type of experience… where you want to bail ASAP, because the number ringing your phone everyday is bogus and undesired. Or where we just have the simplest question to resolve via call to a company, but cannot get a real human on the phone to save our life. Let’s just say, the digital developments at our fingertips these days really concoct a unique challenge to best practices and what it means to actually serve your customers in a genuine way.
We’ll be developing more content in the coming months around these subjects. The exciting part is, there’s an abundance of information to be shared, articles to be read and conversations to be ignited around this subject matter. These advanced tech resources, from marketing automations, to customer service calls are racing forward with fascinating goals and objectives.
Fortunately for us, there are many wonderful software initiatives right in our backyard. It is important to share what we care about, because, well - sharing is caring. Truthfully, it’s important for us to share more with you. We want this article to serve as an introduction to these more advanced concepts. In the coming months, we’ll definitely cover a lot of ground. It will be great to share thoughts, comments, concerns and inspirations from these topics. How does the incredible community of service providers across North America feel about these notions? How are customer service conversations evolving B2B and B2C relationships using the power of web optimizations. Note, these exchanges happen even more so across all channels and devices, with greater speed, and more automated fashion.
Our team strives to provide the best marketing experiences. Introducing these concepts is important, and we look forward to more in-depth conversational pieces coming soon. Stay tuned and let us know what you think. Check back in with us again next week for even more fresh original content.
How do you think advances in technology will shape the future of customer service? Tell us in the comments below!