‘What’s old is new again.’ A classic observation on a vintage style that suddenly looks fresh, hip and relevant again. But in enterprise technology, all that glimmers is not retro gold. In customer service for example, older ways are in fact old and should be laid to rest, or placed behind museum glass in quiet ceremonies and without hope of future reapplication. Most organizations, customer service operations for example, aren’t necessarily trying to return to the past, but many are unfortunately and look like they’ve never left. 
So how does a modern day customer service center mired in the technology past become cool again? Here are three considerations to turn your vintage, phone-only operation from tired to tech’ed:
Resistance to chatbot-assistance is futile
It used to be that the only way you could reach customer service was calling an 800 number and clearing your schedule for the afternoon as you sat on hold, wondering if you’d ever know what it felt like to be happy again. But now the access points into customer service seem to be endless. Facebook’s chatbot-on-Messenger announcement is ushering in a bounty of businesses using automated chat for first-entry brand engagement.
The Aspect Consumer Experience Index found that nearly 40 percent of consumers would rather use messaging apps like Facebook Messenger for customer service versus a phone call. Chatbots can understand and create messages just like people do and can tap into any data cache to answer questions and automatically execute actions. For brands, chatbots deliver accurate and incredibly quick service responses to customers who prefer text and messaging interaction and give agents more time to handle more complex challenges. Consumers get faster answers using the digital domain they prefer and companies deliver convenient service at an ultra-low cost.
What to do
Stay tired: Ignore the billion-plus active users of messaging apps and keep interactions to a single, phone only disaster-waiting–to-happen.
Get tech’ed: Converse and connect with customers on new media platforms, their preferred channels of choice, and reap the benefits of deeper loyalty, increased sales.
Talk is old, text is gold.
There will be a projected 237 Million Americans using smartphones by the year 2019, and yet calling someone today unannounced, is verboten and a dry breech of the unwritten rules of today’s digital-first behavior. It will leave you friendless. The same behavior applies to consumers having a phone conversation with contact customer service – they’d rather not. 81 percent of all consumers agreed that it is frustrating to be tied to a phone or computer to wait for customer service help. 64 percent of them would rather text than call a business according to a Harris Poll. It stands to reason that text, not talk, will become the hip new entry point to the entire customer service experience.
What to do
Stay tired: If you want to stay throwback at all costs, keep your phone-only technologies but the complaints might pile up and your loyal customers might start looking elsewhere.
Get tech’ed: Text is the new talk so consider an upgrade where the action is. Add intelligent, automated text interactions, or messaging bots for faster, simpler and more consumer-cool engagement.
The Self-Service Economy
Self-service is freedom. It’s empowerment. And consumers are addicted to it. Aspect research found that over 70 percent of consumers want the ability to solve most issues by themselves, mainly due to the anytime-anywhere capability self-directed problem solving provides. The heart of the self-service movement lies not only in the desire for consumers to conduct transactions and interactions when its convenient for them, but also like in their personal lives, they can start an interaction in the morning and complete it later in the day as their busy schedules dictate. And that interaction can be on a separate mode…say it starts as a text and concludes in chat or begins with a tweet and ends in call. There is no way consumers are turning back to the ‘please hold’ days of yesterday.
What to do
Stay tired: Keeping customer interactions disconnected will give you more time with your customers but only because they’ll have to repeat themselves over and over and over.
Get tech’ed: Apply contextual technology that connect every conversation, chat or tweet for supremely seamless and satisfying engagement.
Not every trend or technology merits a second look. No one is petitioning for more 1-800 numbers. The user interface into customer service is no longer a single agent who you get to talk to if you just wait long enough. It’s a text, a message, a question posed to Amazon Alexa or another intelligent assistant. Consumer control is the new cool and the ubiquitousness of brand access today offers customers the promise to get service anywhere at any time, and on any device or method imaginable.
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