Companies will reprioritize their values to meet changing buyer priorities
Price will drive the majority of buyer decision making. Customers may be resentful of environmental efforts, viewing them as frivolous and something they must ultimately pay for. Organizations will need to think more about how they can improve customer service while not increasing the price the customer pays. For example, intelligent automation and AI could assist organisations in anticipating customer needs and reacting to those needs in real time in order to retain customers and provide the best offers.
Hyper personalization will happen in 2023.
We’re at a stage of customer service maturity particularly with apps that means hyper-personalization is the natural next step in customer service and by that automation will start replacing typical human to human interaction. For example, you arrive at a fast-food drive through, and it recognises your license plate and brings up your last order. Do you want this again with a 10 percent discount? Just say yes or just touch the ordering device.
Even more specialised personalization will be possible if an app allows for five pre-set orders, such as your standard order, one for when you go for work, one for when you’re alone, your family order, and so forth. With these pre-set orders, the machine recognises your licence plate when you drive through and, if you say “number 1,” it immediately puts the order using the associated payment cards. If you would like to order anything different, simply say “number six something else” to the voice recognition bot. Although this is just one application of hyper personalization, it can be reproduced in many different contexts, resulting in enormous process efficiency.
Companies will begin to accurately measure customer trust
We live in an experience economy where speed, quality, price can be negotiated. The only non-negotiable right now is trust making it the premium currency in a customer relationship and it’s crucial that a way is found to measure it.
There’s probably not a single company in the world that would refute that trust is an important trait to have for their customers, yet there are very few companies (if any) who can accurately measure it.
There are two main elements to trust: 1) Do you mean well? And 2) Will you do the right thing? The Holy Grail is to have a relationship with the company and feel reassured they want to do right by their customers and that they can do right by their customers but it’s also about finding the right mix. To maintain their competitive edge a formula or methodology will be created that allows companies to predict behaviors and create a trust score of their customers.
Organizations will centralize their logic in their quest for success
Large companies will start to centralize their logic. Failure to do so will see them crumble under the weight of their disjointed technology stack and make them destined for failure. Almost all organisations of a significant size (500+ employees) are trying to rationalize the number of applications they’re putting into their ecosystem so instead they just keep on bolting more on. They’re crumbling under the weight of the complexity of all these apps and looking for ways to simplify. Having a holistic view of all your customers is fundamental to delivering great customer service and having both these aspects of the organisation on one system is essential.
Social media taking over as Business Messenger
Businesses will use social media to get responses to frequently asked questions such as store opening times or return policies. Historically, these services haven’t been very reliable because they rely on humans to respond but we’re sure to see an intelligent format of this services using a bot to respond to customer queries providing a much faster and reliable services.
More machine customers are coming
A machine that performs tasks in place of a real human client is known as a machine customer. Therefore, a digital assistant is doing something for me so I don’t have to when I ask Siri to set an alarm or Alexa to turn off the lights but imagine if they could handle customer service contacts on my behalf. Imagine if I could ask Siri to update my postal address with my bank or Alexa to modify my payment date with my phone company, and they would take care of it for me. That is the rise of the machine customer.
In the future there will be four main interaction types between customers and companies. Person to person, the standard. Person to machine, we do this a lot. Machine to person, and the holy grail, machine to machine.
Companies will need a whole new strategy to deal with the M2P and M2M interactions, this can’t be ignored. There are more units on earth capable of being ‘machine customers’ than there are people so when this catches on, it’s going to catch on FAST!
‘Machine customers’ have caught the attention of Gartner who have done studies, and according to them by 2025, 40% of customers will use Machine Customers to interact with customer service…and CEOs and CIO believe that 1/5 of revenue will come from Machine Customers.
This is going to fundamentally re-set every single standard we have of what good customer experience is, there’ll be a new standard for easy, a new standard for fast, a new standard for convenience.
(The author is Mr. Deepak Visweswaraiah, vice president, platform engineering, and site managing director, Pegasystems, India and the views expressed in this article are his own)
