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.