For years, IT Teams have been crucial in driving the growth
and development of businesses around the world. Your IT staff does a lot more
for your organisation than just help people to reset their passwords when they
forget them or deal with basic computer issues.
IT professionals keep the essential
components of the workforce running, from your VoIP communication
strategies to collaboration tools and mobile software. In today’s increasingly digital
environment, IT ensures that your employees can continue to perform at their
best in any situation – even when they’re on the move.
Now that customer service is the most critical
differentiator for any business; IT teams are also playing a part in the future
of customer experience.
Here, we’re going to look at how IT and customer service are
coming together to create the buyer journey of the future.
Automation and AI
One of the biggest worries that today’s team members have
when people talk about examples of good customer service and IT is that they’ll
end up losing their jobs to the rise of AI and robots. After all, experts
predict that 85%
of all customer service interactions will happen without a human agent by
2020. However, the truth is that AI isn’t about taking over human jobs.
IT teams can see where repetitive and exhausting tasks might
be automated to improve their employees’ performance. This means that your team
can spend less time responding to emails and frequently asked questions, and
more time tackling complex consumer problems.
For instance, to enhance customer service, your IT team
might implement self-service bots that respond to basic consumer queries before
passing a person onto a service agent. This means that your human employees
don’t have to waste as much time managing repetitive calls.
Making the most of consumer data
IT teams in the workplace aren’t just responsible for
exploring the latest disruptive technology like AI and virtual assistants – of
course. They’re also the people who analyse and respond to critical and
insightful data. Many businesses are now beginning to hire data scientists and
analysts that can translate the insights they collect each day through
conversations with customers and software reports.
These experts can use the terabytes of information that flow
through a company each day to determine what kind of steps an organisation needs
to take to drive better business outcomes. For instance, your IT team could
discover that the key to improving customer experience for your business is to
offer more assistance through instant messaging, rather than managing all
customer conversations
over VoIP.
IT teams can also use the data that they gather from your
business to nurture new software solutions equipped with machine learning
functionality. This could lead to the creation of things like bots that can
detect when a conversation with a customer is going poorly and give your team
members advice on how
to rectify the issue.
Machines can even figure out which employees in your
business is best-suited to tackle particular problems so that that customer
calls can be routed to the ideal agent first-time around. This reduces your
time to resolution and helps the customer service environment to flow more
smoothly.
Building better buyer journeys with IoT
Another essential area where IT and customer service are
coming together today is in the quest to better understand the customer
journey. For years, sales and marketing teams have tried to figure out what
causes a customer to move from one stage in the buyer path to the next.
Now, with AI, data, and even IoT, IT experts can also play their part in improving the connections between businesses and their customers. For instance, technology teams who know how to use IoT devices can access the data gathered by sensors and connected tools to learn more about your audience. For example if a sensor in your store shows you that your audience spends more time at the front of your shop than in the back, you know where to place items and marketing materials to grab more attention. As technology continues to introduce countless new ways of understanding and catering to the modern customer, IT teams could be at the heart of the current customer service strategy. Don’t underestimate the power of an IT team’s input when it comes to improving customer service.