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Customer Care

Analyst identifies the three technologies that will ‘transform’ customer care this decade

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Generative AI, digital customer service, and conversational user interfaces (CUIs) will transform customer service and support by 2028, according to Gartner.“The common theme of these three technologies are their ability to streamline the customer journey and enable customer service leaders to meet customers’ growing expectations,” said Drew Kraus, VP Analyst in the Gartner Customer Service and Support practice. “Within the next five years, we expect these technologies to change the face of customer service and support.”

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2023 report describes the most important maturing technologies for supporting customers. There is a range of technological maturities, varying from embryonic (Customer Technology Platform), to highly-hyped (generative AI), to mature yet with significant adoption opportunity still remaining (Contact Center as a Service). More than half of the innovation profiles included in the Hype Cycle fall into the Trough of Disillusionment section (see Figure 1).

The Gartner Hype Cycle provides a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of a specific business goal. It allows clients to get educated about the promise of an emerging technology within the context of their industry and individual appetite for risk.

Figure 1: Gartner Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2023

Source: Gartner (August 2023)

Generative AIGartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of customer service and support organizations will be applying generative AI technology in some form to improve agent productivity and customer experience (CX). Generative AI, which is currently at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, will primarily be used for content creation, AI-supported chatbots and automation of human work.

Generative AI’s biggest impact is likely to be on customer experience. According to a recent Gartner poll, 38% of leaders see improving customer experience and retention as the primary purpose of initiatives to deploy applications trained on large language models.

“The impact of AI on the customer service function cannot be overstated,” said Kraus, “Not only do we expect organizations to replace 20-30% of their agents with generative AI, but also anticipate it creating new jobs to implement such capabilities.”

Conversational User Interfaces

CUIs are human-computer interfaces that enable natural language interactions for the purpose of fulfilling a request, such as answering a question or completing a task. CUIs provide direct control between the customer service agent and the applications they are operating. When used to automate support via chatbots, this technology improves customer experience and self-service adoption.

“Customers increasingly expect to be able to interact with the applications they use in a natural way, and this has been accelerated by the emergence of large language model-enabled enterprise applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft 365 CoPilot,” said Kraus. “CUIs will be vital for driving efficiency and meeting customers’ changing expectations.”

Digital Customer Service

As organizations have introduced a proliferation of digital engagement channels, customers have grown to expect instantaneous, effortless customer service experiences. Simultaneously, introducing more channels can increase customer effort as customers move between them.

Digital customer service offerings focus on seamless conversation orchestration across digital channels. The desire for self-service, combined with the emergence of conversational AI, has led to an evolution of most engagement models. As such, Gartner sees the emergence of a new area of customer care referred to as “digital customer service.”

“Digital customer service will transform customer experience outcomes by reducing friction and eliminating unnecessary customer effort,” said Kraus. “By creating a seamless customer experience, this technology will reduce churn and enhance customer satisfaction.”

Image by Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay

20% of inbound contact centre volume will come from machine customers

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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A fifth of inbound customer service contact volume will come from machine customers by 2026, as advances in Conversational AI, Automation, and Low Code Resources impact ways customers and reps interact.

Machine customers are nonhuman economic actors that obtain goods or services in exchange for payment. In customer service and support, they will resemble virtual assistants or smart devices that perform customer service activities on behalf of their human customers, such as reporting issues or gathering product information.“Machine customers will reset customer expectations about what constitutes a low-effort experience, creating a greater competitive gap,” said Uma Challa, Sr Director Analyst in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “Organizations that embrace them will be able to differentiate their value and close the gap by meeting this new standard for effortless service.”

By 2024, Gartner anticipates 100 million requests for customer service will be raised by smart products.

Initially, machine customers will be best served in enterprise chatbot channels due to that channel’s ability to serve these requests at scale. Smart organizations will start to invest in conversational AI platforms (CAIP) to enable bot-to-bot communication.

“Organizations without a machine customer strategy in place won’t have a good way of distinguishing between human and machine customers,” continued Challa. “They may see their non-chatbot channel performance get worse without understanding why.”

Customer service reps are increasingly automating portions of their job to make their work easier, often but not always using company-provided tools to do so: Gartner anticipates 30% of reps will do so by 2026.

Examples of self-automation activities include using quick auto-response technology in emails to customers or using an unauthorized third-party call recorder to transcribe customer calls.

“While self-automation has been happening for a while in the software space, this trend will become more present internally in customer service because reps now have improved access to automation tools,” said Emily Potosky, Director, Research, in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “Emerging resources such as AI models (e.g., Github Co-pilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Codex) will continue to make coding more accessible to reps, regardless of their skill level.”

With this in mind, Gartner expects there will be a greater variety of products in the marketplace centered around employee automation, specifically, low- or no-code solutions targeted at reps to help them self-automate. Vendors that offer collaboration platforms may also increase investment in coding features to allow for groups of reps to work together to self-automate.

“Customer service and support organizations that not only allow but authorize self-automation will become more competitive than those that don’t, as reps will notice and correct inefficiencies that leaders are unaware of,” said Potosky. “These organizations may also become more attractive employers, because potential job candidates are likely to appreciate the organization’s flexibility and openness to innovation.”

The rise of machine customers and self-automation opportunities represent a shift in how employees and customers use technology to interact with customer service. The growing accessibility of technology means that customers and employees are using it in unexpected, and often unauthorized, ways.

To prepare for this, customer service and support leaders should:

  • Create a framework for due diligence to review and approve self-automation opportunities.
  • Invest in a scalable chatbot platform to make it easier to enable machine customers to interact with enterprise bots.
  • Harness employees’ willingness to augment their own work processes, enabling them to create more engaging and effective ways of working.
  • Measure channel performance – bot-to-bot as well as non-chatbot channels – to understand the impact machine customers have on your overall channel portfolio.

148 million extra customer support calls: How the cost of living crisis is impacting customer care

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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UK households will make an extra 148 million customer service enquiries this year as the cost-of-living crisis continues and consumer spending tightens.

That’s according to analysis by Firstsource Solutions, which says higher interest rates, inflation, and rising energy costs mean UK households are more likely to cancel subscriptions, downgrade packages, query bills and charges, and shop around for better deals.

Additionally, many households will struggle to maintain payments, get into arrears, and need to contact their providers for resolutions.

Forecast additional customer service enquiries to UK companies in 2023

  Enquiries per year, million Enquiries per month, million % of enquiries from the 20% poorest households
To financial services companies 64 5.2 34%
To energy providers 70 5.8 38%
To telecoms / media providers 16 1.3 25%
Total 148 12.3 35%

Poorer households are the most likely to struggle with payments. Those with incomes in the bottom 20%, under £17k per year, are likely to account for 38% of additional calls to energy providers and 34% to financial services companies.

Rajiv Malhotra, Head of Europe, Firstsource, commented: “In my experience, businesses want to be empathetic, but unprepared companies may soon find themselves with increasing numbers of vulnerable customers unable to get support, and ever longer waiting times. Putting the customer first means making it straightforward to ask questions and get responses across channels when and where it suits them. It also means having a process in place whereby customers with troubles, concerns or matters of a sensitive nature can speak to a human agent and get help when they need it.”

“We’re already seeing companies expand their contact centre capacity, but it’s difficult in the current labour market. Businesses can relieve some of the pressure on their contact centres by reviewing their digital customer journey by, for example, updating website FAQs, reviewing automated voice queues, adopting SMS and WhatsApp messaging, and channelling basic queries to chatbots. Companies can also plan ahead by considering options for more affordable packages and policies for customers who are behind on payments or facing financial difficulties.”

SMS rises up the ranks for customer communications, but are retailers are missing out on mobile?

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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A Wunderkind survey of over 2,000 UK shoppers has revealed that while email remains the dominant channel for consumers, with 84% saying they find it the most convenient channel for communicating with retailers during the buying journey, a third (32%) say they now find text just as convenient – an increase of 6 percentage points year-on-year.

However, despite this increased consumer demand, just one in three retailers currently use text as a marketing channel (beyond purely transactional communication like delivery updates), meaning the vast majority are missing out on a huge opportunity to engage with customers, increase conversions and, ultimately, encourage a greater number of sales – especially when texts are used in careful conjunction with email.

Just over half (56%) of shoppers say they have received a text message from a brand or retailer in the last 12 months, with the same percentage (56%) saying that the speed and convenience of text as a communications channel enhanced and supported their online buying journey, whether by providing information faster than it would have been received through email, or by helping them react to a fast-changing stage in their buying journey, such as a shipping update or the option to use a discount or promotion.

This desire for text communications, Wunderkind’s research suggests, mirrors the now ubiquitous use of smartphones, with consumers increasingly wanting to interact — and buy — through their mobiles. mCommerce transactions made on smartphones and tablets are expected to represent over half (58%) of all online retail sales this year, rising to 63% by 2024, which will equate to sales of around £105 billion.

A separate poll of 60 senior UK marketing and ecommerce professionals in Wunderkind’s ‘Countdown to 2024’ report showed that just a third (34%) currently use text to communicate and engage with shoppers.

Wunderkind’s General Manager International, Wulfric Light-Wilkinson, said: “Text represents a significant opportunity for retailers to increase loyalty and drive sales. Best-in-class customer engagement isn’t about relying on any one channel – but rather, supporting the shopper on their path to purchase, and meeting them wherever they are.

“Regardless of the channel mix, consumer engagement success comes down to brands putting themselves in the shoes of current and prospective customers, understanding how they like to communicate and operate, and using that insight to build campaigns that engage them seamlessly across multiple touchpoints.”

Additionally, it is worth noting that customers engage quickly with texts, which is ideal for retailers or brands wanting to promote a flash sale or send out a time-sensitive message. Research suggests 90% of people open a text message within three minutes of receiving it, while, according to Gartner, texts have an average open rate of  98% and a response rate of 45% – much higher than email  (which has an average of 20% and 6% respectively).

Download Wunderkind’s full report: The Untapped Potential of Text.

Best practices in SMS customer care

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By mGage

Did you know that 95% of people who had a bad experience are willing to give a brand another go if they know that their issue was dealt with correctly[1]?

Customer care is extremely important for brands, and facilitating customer care over as many communication channels as possible is good business practice.

Text messaging, or SMS, is an excellent channel for customers because it’s convenient, and immediate. We ran a webinar on the Best Practices in SMS customer care and wanted to share some key points below.

SMS Customer Care Use Cases

Customers prefer SMS customer service to voice because it’s more convenient than waiting on the phone. In fact, 81% of all consumers get frustrated being tied to a phone or computer to wait for customer service help[2]. By adding text messaging to your communication, you will reduce operational and call center costs, while at the same time increase customer satisfaction. Below are a few customer care messaging examples that are used today.

Reminders: Sending SMS reminders to your customers will help decrease missed appointments and ensure payment adherence. With 98% of text messages being read within two minutes[3], sending a quick text message is a more efficient way to reach your customers than trying to reach them with a phone call or sending an email they may not see.

Bank Alerts: SMS provides a much more expedited, seamless experience for fraud notifications and charge authorizations, creating a better customer experience than previous methods. By being notified promptly, customers will feel like their bank is looking out for them.

Call-back Requests: Implementing call back requests via SMS immediately reduces strain on your call center and instantly improves customer satisfaction by reducing wait times. You can even enable your toll-free number for this purpose, so customers who are already familiar with your current contact info can continue to use the same number.

Best Practices for Delivering Customer Care Messages

Be Very Clear: Clarity is essential when delivering your customer care messages. Be upfront and set the proper expectations, so customers know what they are signing up for.

Keywords are Key: We always suggest you use the keep it short and simple (KISS) approach for keywords. Customers want to receive messages that are easy to read and digest, so keep it simple and avoid special characters. Choose keywords that won’t be autocorrected and be sure to choose keywords that are straight to the point.

Test Measure & Learn: Finally, learn from all the information you get and use it to improve the customer service you deliver to your customers. Measure the success of your customer service alerts by paying attention to the number of customers opting in and out of your programs. The number of opt-outs is a good indication as to whether the content remains relevant to your audience.

Final thoughts

Provide the best customer support by adding text messaging to your communication channel. These are just some of the best practices we would suggest for your SMS customer care strategy. To view our webinar on the best practices in SMS customer care, click here.

For more in-depth detail, contact us today and speak with one of our experts.

Sources

[1] https://business.trustpilot.com/reviews/5-reasons-why-customer-experience-is-the-pulse-of-every-business

[2] Harris Interactive, “The High Demand for Customer Service via Text Messaging”

[3] RetailDive

Overpayment errors creating customer care ‘ticking time bomb’

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Citizens Advice has found regulators have allowed water, energy, broadband and telephone networks to overcharge customers by £24.1 billion over the past fifteen years.

The charity is calling for companies to return some of this to customers through a rebate on their bills and for regulators to stop this happening again.

The research follows its 2017 report, which found Ofgem made errors in setting price controls for energy networks, resulting in energy customers being overcharged £7.5 billion over an 8-year period. After the charity highlighted these concerns, 3 energy network companies returned some money to consumers.

Citizens Advice has now found this was the tip of the iceberg. The same errors have been made by Ofgem over a much longer period and by regulators in other markets including water, broadband and phone networks over the past 15 years.

This research shows misjudgements by the regulators (Ofgem, Ofwat and Ofcom) on key decisions have meant customers have been paying far too much for the pipes and wires that connect energy, broadband, phones and water to their homes.

Citizens Advice asserts these sectors include companies that face little, or no, competition to drive down the price they can charge their customers. Instead, regulators tell the network companies how much they can charge by setting a price control. Customers then pay the charges for these networks as part of their water, energy, broadband and phone bills.

These overpayments partly occurred because regulators made forecasting errors. They predicted that costs, such as debt, would be higher than they in fact were. Regulators also over-estimated how risky these businesses were for investors.

The charity is recommending that, instead of forecasting costs, regulators should use available market data to calculate costs and adjust their estimates of investment risk. This would avoid consumers paying too much in future.

While several energy and water companies have taken steps to return some money to customers, Citizens Advice is calling for all firms to provide a voluntary rebate to their customers. If they don’t, the government should step in.

Gillian Guy, Chief Executive of Citizens Advice, said: “Regulator error has meant customers have been charged too much by energy, broadband and phone networks for far too long.

“At a time when so many people are struggling to pay their essential bills, regulators need to do more to protect customers from unfair prices. They have started to take steps in the right direction but it is vital they continue to learn from their past mistakes when finalising their next price controls.

“Companies need to play their part in putting this multi-billion pound blunder right. They must compensate customers where they have been paying over the odds. If they don’t government needs to intervene.”

Image by William Iven from Pixabay

Complex customer issues number one challenge for contact centre employees

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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While customer experience continues to be the top priority for businesses, a new report reveals that 56 per cent of contact centre employees cite complex customer problems as their top challenge. And 60 per cent admit their company has left them ill-equipped to handle these problems, leaving agents stressed and unengaged.

The report, The Health of the Contact Centre: Agent Well-Being in a Customer-Centric Era, was commissioned by Calabrio, a provider of customer engagement and analytics software. It surveyed more than 1,000 contact centre employees in the UK and US to uncover the health of today’s contact centres, including agent confidence in the ability to be successful in their jobs, the challenges they face and how technology will dictate the future of the contact centre.

Empowering contact centre employees is more critical than ever as 32 per cent of respondents believe that customer problems will only become increasingly difficult over the next two years, and 45 percent worry customers will expect even more from companies.

The well-being of contact centre employees continues to decline and, if not addressed, it can ultimately affect their ability to deliver the desired customer experience. A quarter (25 per cent) of respondents say they feel stressed multiple times a week, and more than half (52 per cent) agree that their company isn’t doing enough to prevent teams from feeling burned out.

Kris McKenzie, EMEA General Manager at Calabrio said: “Brands are battling it out to deliver the right customer experience to get ahead of the competition and drive market share. What is clear, however, is if they do not rethink the contact centre strategy, they’re putting the entire customer experience at risk.

“As a cornerstone of the customer experience, brands need to implement the right technology in their contact centre but more importantly they need to focus on the people. In doing so, contact centre staff become empowered to quickly make informed decisions and deliver on the experience that customers have come to expect.”

Download the full report here.

 

Ventrica creates 400 new jobs in Southend

 960 540 Stuart O'Brien
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Ventrica has announced plans for extra capacity at a new site in Southend, generating at least 400 new positions and growing its workforce to over 800 staff over the next two years.

The new 14,000sqft. premises will be located close to the town centre, next to the existing contact centre, and operational by September 1st 2017.

Ventrica founder and managing director, Dino Forte commented: “The second centre forms part of our on-going blueprint to develop and grow the company in a sustainable fashion whilst remaining ‘medium-sized’, a fundamental component of our on-going strategy to remain, agile, innovative and technically advanced. Our business plan remains the same which is to offer high quality, personalised outsourced customer care services on behalf of blue chip brands and young dynamic businesses. The additional space will emulate the same inspirational workplace that we’ve already created at our original contact centre. This will double our overall capacity as well as increase our overall resilience for customers.

“From the beginning, our business has always been about people and this remains our number one priority and focus. By developing an amazing environment we’ve been able to attract and retain a high calibre of dedicated staff who are deeply passionate about delivering an exceptional customer experience. Our customers tell us that they love the atmosphere we’ve created and the feel-good factor that is reflected in the attitude of our staff and the strength of their engagements with customers over a wide range of channels from the phone through to webchat, email and social media platforms.”

In 2016, the company celebrated the opening of its penthouse suite, providing an additional 6,000 sq. ft. of capacity, the launch of its new digital division for outsourced social media management and the winning of ‘Contact Centre of the Year’ at the London & South East Contact Centre Awards.

Ventrica currently employs 400 full and part-time staff and works on behalf of household names such as New Look, McDonalds, Jimmy Choo, UGG Australia, Barratt Homes and the UK’s leading retirement homes builder, McCarthy & Stone.

www.ventrica.co.uk

Industry Spotlight: “It’s up to you how to handle social channels, but choose wisely”…

 800 450 Jack Wynn
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The term ‘call centre’ usually conjures up images of vast open office spaces, occupied by dozens of telesales representatives parked in front of computer screens with their omnipresent headsets.

Gone are the days where the primary source of communication is by telephone. In the digital age, many consumers decide to take to their desktop when they want to make a purchase or, more importantly, air a grievance.

In an ideal world, a customer that has a concern will reach out to your call centre via telephone. Customer care specialists can pull up details quickly, and can use the pauses to engage with the person on the other end of the phone. With this said, the concept of Live Chat allows the opportunity to address a complaint while the customer is online and available to participate in the process as well.

The internet is rife with opportunities to either sing the praises or throw some acid on a business. Social media pages, Yelp, Trip Advisor, Feefo, Google and Trustpilot are just some of the channels that allow the consumer to rate and leave feedback on virtually any business on the planet. Therefore, today’s customer support professionals need to be adept at handling complaints through various outlets.

There is a growing number of people who take to social media to vent about their experience with a brand. And everyone loves to read a good rant, right? What can end up happening is people start piggy-backing on the original comment, and before you know it there is a viral complaint about your company flying all over the internet. Left unattended, these can fester and do ongoing damage to your business.

So what’s a brand to do? Here are a few simple tips:

1)    Monitor your social media pages: Make sure you check for direct messages. The sooner you acknowledge someone’s issue, the easier it will be to make them a fan of your business again.

2)    Search for your brand: People may not bother searching for your official Facebook page or Twitter handle, and the only way you’ll find those harsh comments is searching for your brand name. Include searches for common misspellings. Then try to engage with those individuals, but get them off public pages and on to email or telephone.

3)    Check your ratings: Usually, a one-star rating on sites like Trustpilot can be remedied by apologising for the experience the customer had, and asking them to get in touch to try to find a satisfactory resolution to the issue. That is the result what people want.

4)    Keep your cool: The internet explodes with a story gone viral every few months. A customer who complained on social media received a defensive (and usually offensive) reply from the business. As much it might pain you, the customer is always right; bite your tongue and try to address the issue in a timely fashion.

How you manage your social media customer support can be a dream come true, or your worst nightmare. It’s up to you how to handle it, so choose wisely.

 

Words by Bernadette Kelly, of director business development at ActiveWin Media 

 

Bernadette is a native New Yorker, starting her career as a telesales representative. She has managed large call centre teams in California before relocating to Manchester in 2010. Recently, Bernadette was selected as a judge for VOOM2016 to help Richard Branson decide which start-up would win £1 million in prizes.