A new study issued jointly by Aspect Software and The Center for Generational Kinetics provides research-based observations on fundamental changes in customer-to-business (C2B) conversations. Chief among them, from my perspective is that “65% of all Americans say that they feel good about themselves and the company when they can solve a problem without talking to customer service.” This stands in stark contrast to a multiplicity of reports and empirical observations that individual’s spend a good deal of their time and effort trying to figure out how to “get to a human.” That attitude is so-o-o-o last century.
Cutting to the chase, the report culminates in a section entitled, “The Future of Customer Service is Self Service.” That is a truism that should be baked into every satisfaction-conscious company’s current plans for customer-initiated authentication, interactions and transactions. In the brief report, Aspect Software has some recommendations of its own, including the pursuit of an omni-channel strategy; insistence that customer experience executives shop and experience their companies’ customer care “as if you were a Millennial;” and finally “Imagine that you could no longer solve customer service problems with a phone call or in-person answer.”
The final suggestion is my favorite because it gets to the heart of “Intelligent Assistance,” a topic that we tackled in a conference last October (view the agenda and videos of panels and presentations here). As customer care and customer experience experts take a deep dive the self-service paradigm, it will breed understanding of the authentication, communications and routing, natural language understanding, analytics, knowledge management and other resources required to deliver the right answers or connect to the right resources in real-time.
The next Intelligent Assistance Conference will convene in New York City in October. We expect heightened attention and requirements for self-service and assisted self-service to make this the a very timely gathering for customer care and customer experience professionals to see more implementations of IA and meet with solutions providers and peers to define strategies and tactics for intelligently serving Millennials.
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