1800... To The Rescue

Customer Support Experience… a Boon or a Bane? Let’s Examine...
 

- Arijit Chatterji

One thing is sure that the age-old techniques of customer service are changing. While earlier consumers use to call on support numbers for every query irrespective of big or small, they are now moving towards self-help and context driven communications. A Gartner report in 2011 suggested that by 2020 a customer would manage 85% of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. Another report suggests that approximately 70% consumers today expect a company’s website to have some self-service application.

The trend today is moving towards demanding consumers, who want instant gratification and have high expectations from a company to not just know and understand their pain points but also to predict and provide for their future needs.

This can be seen clearly in the way technology has evolved, from vanilla telephony set-ups to focused IVRs and now the modern day context driven solutions like Omni channel, AI driven chatbots, Self Help guides etc. along with the more recent speech recognition and speech based IVRs. These were all developed to gratify the need of better understanding and for companies to be ready with the information their consumers want before they even realise it.

Going forward companies will have to create multi-fold customer experience strategies for their multidimensional consumer and this can be done best by evaluating their customer’s journey and providing them with the right content at the right platform in as less a time as possible.

With this premise set, I would like to clear my stance and say that I refute the old ways of practising customer experience for their lack of scalability and customisation abilities and I defend the modern solutions for improving customer experience. In order to prove my stance better, I have here categorised consumers today in three and will suggest the right approach for improving the experience for each.