Automation in customer service is not a new phenomenon. The self-service branch in particular has grown leaps and bounds over the past few years, with supermarket self-checkout counters, food-ordering phone apps and online chatbots becoming solidly embedded in our everyday lives.
Millennials and Gen Z in particular, who are more digital-savvy than previous generations, are championing automated technology in their consumer journeys, with Guthrie Jensen finding that 75% of millennials prefer to solve their own customer service issues and that Gen Zers have higher expectations for technology and are more willing to experiment with new automated platforms. Furthermore, Gartner predicts that 25% of customer service operations will use virtual customer assistants this year. Automation, it seems, is inevitable.
Indeed, as 2020 commences, automation technology will and must be at the front and centre of improving call centre customer service, especially for younger generations and future customers who expect to have a fully omnichannel customer experience (CX), putting their digital know-how into practice. Automation technology will also be fundamental in empowering agents in their work as introducing a digital workforce alongside human agents has many benefits, from reducing costs and churn, to enabling agents to provide a better, more human service by allowing them to do work that holds meaning for them.
If contact centres and companies are to embrace the benefits of automation in 2020, they need to know how to make the most of an automated strategy. Looking at how to select the right processes to automate and considering what it means for the human agents on the front line are key places to start.
Contact us to find out more.
Read the full article in Contact-Centres.
Stephen is IPI’s CX (Customer Experience) Solutions Director, with responsibility across product, commercial and development functions. A CX expert and technologist with over 20 years’ experience, Stephen has worked both partner and vendor side at some of Europe’s biggest contact centre integrators and at the world’s largest workforce optimisation and analytics vendor. His focus has been on pioneering the development of AI, self-service and compliance technologies for the contact centre space and he was recently awarded a patent for the co-invention of a revolutionary fraud prevention tool for contact centres. Passionate about helping organisations realise the promise that technology makes, he is a regular contributor and speaker at CX and contact centre events around the world.
