Customer Service Technology; The Future is now

Looking at recent times, technology has shown its importance and it has helped survive this unusual period where physical contact is restricted and places locked down for weeks etc.

The following are changes technology would make to the future of customer service in Nigeria:

1. Face-to-face video communication will increase:

Eye contact is powerful and customers, more and more, will look at non-video, real-time voice conversation as a thing of the past. We know that eye contact improves relationships and facilitates openness so video is not just a growing expectation of consumers, but a viable business-improving tool for vendors.

2. Real-time messaging will outpace email:

Email is dead, and long live chat. Right? Well, yes and no. Just like video, customers expect you to be always on and most prefer live chat to email. The world operates in synchronous time now, so that means you need to move up your communication technologies and strategies while still using email to share important information.

3. Remote work will become more normal:

The future of customer service will not only push customers online, but it’ll move service reps there, too. Rather than being confined to call centres, service reps will have more tools to work remotely. They’ll field customer inquiries from the comfort of their homes, instead of having to work in an office setting. Email, live chat, and social media can even be operated from a smartphone. As businesses see the potential savings of reducing office space, it’ll become much more common for service reps to work remotely.

4. Bots (and AI) will help professionals, not replace them: Bots can be there when you can’t, like while your customer service team is asleep. Bots can also improve self-service for customers, and reduce expenses for vendors, by providing a new, repeatable, and inexpensive method of communications. Over the next 10-25 years, this technology will continue to make huge advances and will be capable of doing even more of what humans are doing today. It will be smart for customer-facing teams to keep up with bot progress and stay on the cutting edge here to provide increasingly better experiences at increasingly lower costs.