How technology can transform customer service

Customers are transforming the buying process to better meet their needs. Requirements for technology advancement, secure interactions and intuitive user interfaces are critical.

Companies need to invest without ever losing sight of the customer experience, which according to Gartner, 89 per cent of business leaders believe is the new “battlefield” for competition.

Companies who get it right will gain competitive advantage and turn customer experience into a revenue making opportunity.

Cisco’s Nicolette Philokyprou, Cisco Collaboration Service Creation & Portfolio Management, and Angie Mistretta, Senior Director of Cisco Collaboration Product Marketing look at three common customer service situations and how technology is helping deliver customer satisfaction.

Fault finding and fixing

Most of us have been there, trying to describe to family, friends or colleagues how to fix something remotely. Trying to describe what they are seeing and what button you need them to press next can turn into something from a sketch show.

In a business environment, add in a changing workforce and new technologies to maintain, and it’s nearly impossible to have at hand all of the information to get the job done.

With Augmented Reality, a worker can pull up to a job site, don a pair of AR glasses, and have at their fingertips every piece of information necessary to perform their task. In some instances, they can connect live to a remote technical service agent to help walk them through particularly difficult activities.

Getting the right answer to the right person

Digital customer care, self-service technologies and the rise of the app have already pushed a lot of the simple, repetitive stuff out of human contact queues. Contact centres have taken on more complex and emotive issues than ever before.

To keep customer satisfaction high, agents need to answer questions quicker and better.  To make their interactions the best they can possibly be, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning can automatically provide agents or customers with relevant documents to help guide conversations and continuously learn in order to deliver increasingly more relevant information over time.

Agents will become faster and more knowledgeable, transforming the way businesses interact with their customers.

Creating revenue opportunities

In the complex world we now live in, customers are only willing to do so much to engage with your organisation. And agents can only expend so much effort to help them before your cost of service exceeds the value of a transaction. Organisations that get customer service right create revenue opportunities. For example, Angie says, “the company I buy my kids shoes from sends me reminders before the start of the school year. They make it easy to buy from them, so I do.”

By learning from your customers and increasing the relevance of your products and services by having an on-going dialogue, you can meet your customers’ expectations of excellent customer service.

Find out more about the partnership between BT and Cisco and discover how you can transform your customer service.