Do Machines Hold the Key to More Personal Customer Service?

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Customer Care Leadership Forum in New York City, where the topic of conversation was the future of customer service. As someone who has spent much of their career in the enterprise communications and call center technology space, it’s a topic I’ve thought about and revisited many times over the years. And I believe we’re already starting to see that future today as companies talk less about efficient customer service and talk more about excellent customer service.

Historically, the innovations in customer care technology have focused on internal efficiencies that could be summed up by words like faster and cheaper. The drive to efficiency led to innovations like customer information pop-up screens, which enabled service agents to quickly access customer information and provide faster service. That was followed by customer self-service portals, which further reduced time and cost. Yet while innovations like these streamlined the customer service process, they didn’t differentiate the service in a way that was truly meaningful for the customer.

Today, our constant connectedness to information and communication through social media and mobile devices has raised our expectation of engagement. It’s no longer just about how quickly a call is answered, it’s about understanding and even anticipating what the customer expects from the experience. And that’s a real challenge for businesses today because my definition of what constitutes a “great” customer experience may be very different from the way you or someone else defines it. Factor in our personal media preferences for voice, video, IM and text, and those experiences could look completely different too.

So how do businesses discover our individual customer care comfort zones? Through analytics—but not analytics as usual. Today, most analytics focus on reactive engagement: an online purchase, a product return, a complaint to a call center. The product-customer relationship, however, is much broader than “I want to buy something” or “I’m unhappy with something.” And it’s here that social media can be a great tool for analytics, because it provides insight into what customers think about your products, your brand, etc. when they’re in the act of using those products, and not just when they’re in the act of buying them or complaining about them.

A corollary of social media’s openness and connectivity is the desire for more connectedness in customer care. In the future, I believe machine-to-machine (M2M) communications will play a much larger role in customer care by, in a sense, embedding customer service into the product. It’s not hard to imagine appliances and all manner of products having direct-call or connect capabilities embedded in them that allow the appliance to “phone home” to a diagnostic and fix engine. For example imagine your washing machine “talking” to a remote application that figures out what is wrong, opens a ticket and ships a part to the owner before they even know there is a problem. If the machine can’t be repaired, it opens up a sales lead and sends it to the sales desk.

Another technology, webRTC, would enable users of any machine to talk via data, phone, video to sales and customer service personnel. Imagine connecting to a bank loan officer from an ATM cash machine.

The future is about connectedness and anticipatory service that creates a more robust customer experience. That future is one reason why I and many others are excited about technologies like WebRTC that enable these kinds of M2M interactions.

So where do you think the future of customer service is headed? Will it be five years before every ATM has a live video chat screen or 25 years? Would you pay more for an appliance that made its own service calls?