This week, I’m continuing our Industry Perspectives series by highlighting Kate Leggett’s blog post, “Forrester’s Top Trends For Customer Service In 2014”. In the piece, Kate explains how the recent shifts in digital communication, mobility, and the acceleration of innovation are impacting customer expectations. The article highlights the top 12 customer service trends for 2014 that enterprises should pay attention to in order to ensure excellence in customer service.
My favorites fell into two of her four categories: Personalize Customer Service Interactions and Focus on Productivity for Optimized Service
Here are some quotes from my favorite trends Kate lists.
Decisioning Will Power Offers, Actions and Connections
Kate says: “In 2014, customer service organizations will continue to investigate methods to recommend agent “next-best actions” during the service resolution process to offer service tailored to the customer’s unique needs and past purchase history. Predictive analytics will continue to be explored to recommend the right content to customers, and connect customers to agents in order to increase satisfaction and reduce overall costs.
Analytics Will Improve End-to-End Service
Kate says: Customer communication channels and touchpoints are managed by different organizations within a company… Forrester reports that 58% of companies inconsistently measure, or fail to measure their customer’s cross channel journey.”
The Agent Experience is No Longer an Afterthought
Kate says: “Customer service agents, who use tens or even hundreds of disconnected applications during their workday, are demanding that their solutions be more usable, so that they can focus on solving the customer’s issues and delivering differentiated service.”
Customer Service Organizations Are Adopting SaaS Solutions for Agility
Kate says: “Forrester data shows that 15% of organizations have already replaced all or most of their on-premise customer service applications with software-as-a-service (SaaS)solutions; and 24% complement their existing solutions with SaaS. The main benefits of SaaS include increased business agility, and speed of deployment, and allowing for more focus on other projects critical to the success of the business.”
I have been championing these very trends for years. That is why our Customer Engagement Analytics offering:
1. Uses big data technologies and techniques to collect and connect all the data from the various contact center channels and systems
2. Applies predictive analytics to this data to determine how best to serve customers in their “context” based on their history and intent
3. Uses the analytics to match customers with the best agents and arming the agents with the data they need to serve the customer better
4. Is offered as a SaaS solution to minimize our customers’ capital outlay, reduce their time to value and accelerate their ROI
The next few years should be very exciting and innovative ones for the contact center industry. I’ve been looking forward to them.
