What is 'intelligent' customer service - and how does it resolve today's service challenges?

View MyCustomer's latest webinar that explores how intelligent customer service is helping organisations to address their biggest service challenges. 

Service leaders continue to find themselves grappling with the same two challenges that they have faced, year upon year – the growing service expectations of today’s customers and the requirement to make service operations profitable.

So how can organisations reconcile the two?

MyCustomer recently hosted a webinar to explore the nature of intelligent customer service and how it has the promise to solve service leaders’ two biggest challenges at once.

In this webinar - Faster issue resolution with intelligent customer service - John Heald, global vice president of SAP Service Cloud and Nigel Darwell-Stone from Xograph Healthcare highlighted how AI and IoT-powered customer service is enabling organisations to create great service experiences and turn your customers into advocates.

Click here to register and view the webinar - because it has never been more important to learn about this topic.

Evidence suggests that organisations are continuing to face significant obstacles in their efforts to improve the customer experiences they deliver. In Forrester Research’s most recent Customer Experience Index, not a single brand in the UK has managed to rise to the top of the rankings or indeed continued to move upward at all, with British brands stagnating as more and more UK businesses become mediocre.

It’s an alarming statistic, yet service leaders in Britain are well-acquainted with the challenges that are holding them back – indeed, it is the same obstacles that have hindered them for several years.

In Forrester Research’s most recent Customer Experience Index, not a single brand in the UK has managed to rise to the top of the rankings or indeed continued to move upward at all.

First and foremost, experience-savvy customers are setting the expectation bar ever higher. Simply put, consumers are now easily dissatisfied.

Research by independent market research specialist Vanson Bourne revealed that that over three quarters (77%) of respondents reported bad customer experiences within the last year, with 96% of respondents stating that they would take some type of action if they’ve had a bad customer experience, including not purchasing again from a particular brand or sharing their experiences on social media.

This particular challenge is compounded by the second obstacle familiar to service leaders – the struggle to battle the strain between squeezing out cost reduction and generating service profitability.

When MyCustomer recently surveyed 100 contact centre professionals about their opinions on – and adoption of – call centre technologies, the results were resounding. Nearly half (45%) told us that the emergence of new contact centre technologies represented an opportunity to improve the discipline of customer service

But when it came to the adoption of new contact centre, 40% told us that they considered themselves to be slow adopters, hamstrung by the need to keep costs to a minimum.

Can there realistically be any improvement while service leaders continue to find themselves in this bind?

Vanson Bourne’s research suggests that knowledgeable staff and quick resolution of issues are the key characteristics of a good customer experience. However, about two-fifths (39%) of survey respondents have encountered varying speed of service from an organisation depending on the channel they used to interact - a clear indication that agents do not have the data or tools they need to consistently deliver exceptional customer service, regardless of channel.

But faster issue resolution, and therefore improvement in CX standards, are on the horizon thanks to the emergence of intelligent customer service, powered by AI and IoT. And if you want to find out how to make the case for investment then you’ll want to join MyCustomer for its latest webinar.

Hosted by MyCustomer editor Neil Davey, is joined by John Heald, global vice president of SAP Service Cloud and Nigel Darwell-Stone from Xograph Healthcare, the webinar highlights why fast and smart service is at the core of customer experience.

Register for the webinar now.