Technology advances quickly and it’s easy to lose focus on how to adapt your business. The goal is to create an improved experience for you and your customers, rather than an experience that has been made more complicated with unnecessary bells and whistles.
In this article I’ll share, through my lens as a customer service expert, the advantages and disadvantages of some of the latest developments in customer service. Not every new fad will improve your customer service and it’s important to remain critical on the actual helpfulness of new tools before implementing.
We’ll evaluate four trends:
1. AI tools
The introduction of ChatGPT, an advanced AI model, has caused shock and even fear within different industries, as the threat of work reduction looms. I know a lot of business entrepreneurs are excited to start automating things, but it’s important to first think it through.
An AI model can work in your favor if you can easily implement it into your business: You don’t want to completely rearrange all your processes and standard operating procedures (SOP’s) just to integrate AI. Consider the following when looking at how AI could integrate with your company.
Benefits to using an AI assistant Include:
- Availability 24/7: A smart AI assistant can be accessible on your website, even when you or your employees cannot (because they need to sleep). An AI will be able to handle queries while you’re away, so that the questions don’t pile up during the night
- The ability to scale quickly: An AI program is able to handle multiple queries simultaneously, without the additional wait time that comes with human agents handling several queries. Even if your agents are on the case, it can be helpful to have the AI as a backup to handle spikes in chat-traffic
- Efficiency: An AI can do the background work, creating reports or overviews, leaving your employees free to do other tasks
Downsides to using AI include:
- The lack of human touch: While nobody can and will fault the AI for its grammar, spelling and excellent set up of emails and articles, it will most certainly lack a “human touch”. With AI in its infancy, the program doesn’t see nuances, doesn’t detect sarcasm or jokes and does not have the capacity to personalize a response
- Possible errors and clashes: AI, due to its lack of ability to detect nuances or other human inclinations in emails, may provide a completely different or even a biased answer that you’re unable to correct if you automate the process. Additionally, since it’s still a program, you need to keep an eye on it for system errors and check in with it, to make sure it’s learning the right things
2. Self-service portals
Self-service portals offer a number of advantages to both your company and the customers accessing it. First and foremost, these portals enable customers to access information, products, and services in their own time, without needing to contact your customer service employees. This will attract a number of customers, especially the independent ones.
Self service portals allow customers to manage their own returns and exchanges and use this portal 24/7 which will, as with the use of an AI model, reduce waiting times and a pile up of questions and issues.
By offering information and services that allow the customer to browse for themselves, you will free up time for your customer service agents to get on with other tasks. They can still be ready and willing to assist where necessary or requested, but the customer can arrange things without them and your agents can focus on more specialized cases.
In offering a self service portal keep these things in mind:
- Accessibility: If your self service portal is not clear, easy to follow and user friendly, your customers will get frustrated, even before they come into contact with one of your agents. A frustrated customer is more difficult to retain than a neutral one, so be careful on how you set up the portal.
- The human touch: This will come back again and again. While you will have your fair share of customers who will love your new self-service portal, there will always be those who prefer contact with an actual living being. You need to be able to offer both of these options (self-service and human interaction) as an equal opportunity, lest a part of your customers might feel neglected.
3. Omnichannel support
The new standard for customer contact is to have a minimum of three ways for customers to contact you. This is called omnichannel support. The three most common are telephone, chat and email. Many companies will also include social media—usually Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and even platforms like Pinterest.
But are all these different options really necessary? While it’s nice that you have all these options at your disposal, it’s important to really look at your product and company and see what will and won’t benefit you when you offer it.
If you have a product that’s focused on the senior part of the population, there’s no use in investing in TikTok or Pinterest, as these are not platforms that will attract the more mature customers. On the other hand, you might be mad if you don’t include extensive phone support with your company or website.
Plan to provide at least two out of three of the original contact methods (telephone, email, and chat). Companies targeting a younger generation tend to only offer email and chat, as their customers prefer to communicate through text over calling (why invest in something you won’t need?).
Take a hard look at what will help your company move forward and best fits your clientele. Not every new opportunity needs to be jumped at. The pros and cons to know about each communication method include:
Phone
Pros: human contact, immediate solutions and widely used method of communication
Cons: time consuming and takes up all the attention of your agent(s) so they can’t do anything else
Pros: convenient and flexible for both the customer and CS and allows for extensive explanations
Cons: time consuming if you don’t work with templates and can pile up quickly if you don’t have enough employees
Chat
Pros: immediate assistance, low threshold for the customer
Cons: time consuming and can take over an agent’s day if not used in combination with bots
Social media
Pros: can be used in many forms and across many platforms, low threshold for the customer
Cons: quality of the communication may suffer and clear boundaries are necessary
4. WhatsApp Business
Let’s take a look at the WhatsApp Business trend and the role it is playing in customer service. Some view WhatsApp as the perfect combination between social media and chat.
WhatsApp Business, a tool owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, makes the threshold to contact your company virtually non-existent. This can create some side effects to be mindful of before guiding all your customers into the WhatsApp channel.
Let’s start with the positive first: the combination of social media and chat. Communication can be instantaneous and multimedia sharing in case of questions or complaints makes it that much easier to identify and resolve issues.
In a broader sense, a WhatsApp business account has the option to send out mass messages, making it a great tool for marketing.
That said, there are risks to keep in mind. One concern is privacy and security. Consider if the information you exchange with your customers across a channel like WhatsApp is worth the security risk. It’s hard to govern security on social sites like Facebook.
A second concern is a lack of professionalism. While a more casual conversational style can attract a certain customer base, it can be difficult for your agents to maintain a level of professionalism and not get lost in “street slang.”
Unless that is part of what you’re selling, you may want to prevent your customer service team from incorporating casual language into your program.
Use trends to improve your service
Every seasoned business owner will keep an eye on new and upcoming developments to improve customer service communication. It’s important as you notice new developments to maintain your long term vision for your company.
My recommendation is to take a considered approach when it comes to adopting new trends for customer service. Be the one to observe from a distance and let other businesses work out the kinks.
I help businesses begin and maintain their customer experience programs. If you’d like some help with your program, send an inquiry through my Upwork profile and we can discuss the best options for your needs.
My name is Linda and I've been working in customer service for over 15 years. During this time period, I started as an agent, and moved up to trainer, supervisor and manager. Along the way, I found that my talents were in setting up completely new customer service departments, including the software, and training and managing customer service agents. However, anything and everything adjacent to these areas of expertise holds my interest and I love expanding my knowledge and finding new ways to delight the customer.
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