Once upon a time, good customer service was mostly a matter of fulfilling a few key metrics, such as how many rings a caller had to wait before someone picked up the line.

But times have changed. At a recent webinar sponsored by HCLTech, three digital marketing experts said digital technology is giving companies a wide range of new possibilities to improve customer service but warned that it is also raising customer expectations. 

 “Just look at Apple, Siri and Amazon Alexa, and how they have become integral to our digital experience. Customers expect seamless interactions with these AI-powered assistants,” said Mila D’Antonio, Principal Analyst for Customer Engagement at Omdia, the market research firm.

At the same time, D’Antonio added that the kind of AI-powered recommendation systems used by platforms such as Amazon, Netflix and Spotify have “propelled us into a new era where consumers demand what I call hyper-personalization. They expect recommendations and experiences based on their unique preferences and behaviors.”

The downside is that it doesn’t take long for the customer to expect consistent excellence from everyone else as well. “Having to call someone, having to wait, tends to seem more burdensome for them,” said Francisco Chamorro, Director of Marketing and Communications for BBSI, an HR, payroll services and consultancy firm.

Customer service is everybody's job

With the rise in customer expectations, AI-powered customer service is also impacting what happens on the contact center’s side of the call, improving the employee’s experience alongside the customers. “They’re giving customer-facing employees the knowledge and the context to really engage more proactively now, and this is freeing up their time to really focus on higher value tasks,” explained D’Antonio.

As well as changing how customer service is delivered, the technology is changing who needs to think about it. Customer service is “no longer the responsibility of the contact center,” said D’Antonio, who noted that the new customer contact platforms “really empower key stakeholders in the enterprise.” 

Experts said these platforms are creating a variety of new opportunities for marketers.

“Just this week, I was researching locations for a summer vacation, and was served up photos, idyllic beachfront properties from Airbnb…they were enticing me to book,” said D’Antonio. 

“As customers like me progress to the consideration stage, personalized content will become more important in guiding my behavior and driving those conversions. This could include product recommendations, personalized offers and interactive tools. In the Airbnb example, maybe they would provide me with recommendations and reviews or tailored itineraries —  this all goes a long way to making conversions.”

Tarun Aggarwal, SVP and Global Business Head of HCLTech X, a one-stop digital engagement and publishing platform, said he loves it when companies can use the customer’s data to anticipate the content the consumer wants to see. 

“If I know my customer…we can use that to predict what the future need of this consumer during a holiday could be. Now the moment we start doing that, we really start creating a delight to bring a smile to the customer’s face because I’m imagining a holiday. And somebody’s showing me options of how to make my holiday better. The moment you can…connect with the brand, and especially make that emotional connection with your brand, what you can build is something really, really great,” he said.

This can go beyond content delivery as well. D'Antonio pointed to Target’s guest experience dashboard as a model of how companies can integrate and analyze data to improve in-store experiences too. By collecting and analyzing feedback from a variety of touchpoints, the company can identify negative feedback related to a specific store, making it possible for management to identify a root cause, such as understaffing or a technical glitch. 

Chamorro warned that it’s important to ensure the data is relatively fresh. “Make sure that whatever system you have is as close to real-time data as possible is going to be hugely important for our business because the trends of consumers a year ago might be different than those of consumers from two weeks ago,” he said. “Making sure that you have easy access to the real-time data in an easily consumable way is probably going to be a huge, huge, huge benefit to your company and your team.”

But the marketing experts warn that many of these possibilities depend on careful handling of the customer’s data. “Companies have to start with a strong foundation of data to really enable that understanding of their customer,” said D’Antonio.

Realizing the potential of all this data also depends on giving employees the power to make data-driven decisions. “If you have real-time data insights but aren’t acting on them, then you’re not going to see results,” she added.

Three questions toward an improved experience

Unlike earlier advances in customer service, which were driven more often by technology's capacities, improvements today depend more on understanding your customer’s needs. Just buying the technology is not enough, said Aggarwal. You will need six to nine months to collect the data and fully understand it. 

Fortunately, three questions can get you started:

• Do you know your customer? “I think it’s super, super important to know your customer, to know your audience,” said Chamorro. In particular, he said, you should have a clear idea of your ideal customer profile.

• What pain points can you solve for the customer? “When I think of personalization, I think it goes beyond knowing your first name and your company…those are table stakes. When I think of personalization, I think, what is that pain point that your [ideal customer] is facing that I can help them with?” said Chamorro. 

• What would engage your customer most?  “You will need to be able to deliver personalized experiences while keeping your customer’s data safe and making offers at the right time on the customer’s journey,” said D’Antonio.         

“Overall, I think delivering content that is relevant and timely and tailored to those individual needs, requires knowing your audience…This is how businesses can create those memorable experiences that resonate along the [sales] funnel,” he added.

But proceed with caution, the marketers warned. “One mantra that we use internally is ‘engage and not outrage’ the customer. I think this is a nice tagline that can help us from going overboard,” said Aggarwal.