Automation and Customer Experience - Insights from State of Service Report

2022 has been about restoring normality with many ingenious innovations but has had its fair share of challenges too. From the inflation pressures to the most extensive employee layoffs, the global recession will also cast a shadow on 2023. So, what lies ahead?

Will AI take away our jobs? Or would this be the year for another sci-fi invention to come true? 

Though no one can truly anticipate how the world of customer service will change in 2023, we can still base our theories on lessons from previous years. 

Salesforce has released its “State of Service Report, 2022,” which puts the last year into perspective with insights from 7000+ professionals worldwide. 

Here are some key striking points from the report that we believe would be central in transforming CX in 2023. 

Customer expectations have soared post the pandemic

Customers are craving efficient, authentic, and personalized experiences that most businesses struggle to offer. About 73% of customers expected agents to understand their unique needs and expectations, while 83% expressed the need for speedy resolutions. This underscores the need for businesses to deal with complex customer issues without stretching conversations to multiple calls. 

With customer preferences witnessing a radical change, businesses that fail to address customer needs run the risk of making the customer feel ignored, unseen, and uncared for. Close to 56% of customers reported that they were treated like numbers by service professionals. 

Apart from the ability to address customer concerns, what truly set the competition apart this year was an “empathetic ear.” Businesses that heeded customers’ call for empathy on both the information and policy front were able to win customers’ loyalty and trust. The survey reported 71% of respondents stayed loyal to a business that showed empathy during the pandemic. 

Businesses are prioritizing customers with newer engagement strategies

As economic uncertainty prevails for businesses across the spectrum, the key focus of service professionals has shifted to efficiency and cost-saving apart from meeting customer expectations. The right tools can turn CX challenges into revenue-driven opportunities.

Digital channels have become a viable alternative that checks all the above boxes.  The adoption of newer digital engagement channels, such as social media, customer portals, and online chat/live support, has seen a marked uptick since the pandemic, with an estimated 57% of customers preferring to engage via digital channels. 

Despite the adoption of digital channels, the survey reported an average of 36% of service professionals still struggling to resolve customer queries timely. 

To fare favorably on the inevitable battle of speed and quality, businesses are gradually shifting towards automation technologies, AI being the prime example. 

How are businesses feeling about automation? 

Automation has found wider adoption among service professionals. The survey reported that the number of service decision-makers using AI has increased by 88% since 2020, from 24% of respondents to 45%.

The simple reason for this is the direct impact of automation on the efficiency of service professionals. By bringing down the average response time to a query, it allows more customer queries to be addressed in a shorter amount of time without shooting up costs. Further, round-the-clock availability allows customers to reach out to agents anytime, anywhere, thus boosting CSAT scores and complementing agent productivity.  

The Major benefit of automation for customer service professionals

Automation tools have a good record of resolving queries the first time around, thus leaving agents more time to develop innovative and creative solutions for addressing complex customer queries. Agents are usually caught up in manual tasks, which can be exhausting enough for them to render service errors inevitable. Automation frees agents from dreary manual tasks,  ultimately preventing errors. 

Further, automation paves the way for seamless and efficient customer service by breaking down organizational silos. Smooth and seamless automated workflows allow teams to communicate and collaborate across dispersed work environments by bridging disjointed teams and processes. 

How do customer service agents use automation?

The most common use of AI in customer service right now is routing queries for faster resolutions. The share of organizations using  AI tools for call deflection purposes alone has jumped by 20% since 2020.

Here are a few of the ways that agents use automation in contact centers

a) Automate digital transcripts

While telephone usage has decreased over the years, it remains the most used customer service channel, owing to the fact that some issues are best handled live and through a familiar medium. While more than half of the agents handle calls through their agent console, a similar percentage of agents need not take notes, thanks to the automated digital transcripts allowing them to deliver empathetic services, which is 53%, according to the survey. 

b) Train new hires

A critical key to getting higher turnover rates requires training the employees in both hard and soft skills. An estimated 81% of decision-makers reported that training in investments had gone up from 79% in 2020 and 77% in 2018. 

Automation technology adoption has brought down the costs of training and made skill-set differentiation quite apparent through extensive product knowledge (56%), clear communication (54%), and empathy (51%)

c) Facilitates remote working

The survey reported that there had been a dynamic shift from physical offices to remote and hybrid work environments. The changing labor dynamics have rendered close to 76% of professionals the freedom to choose where they work from. With automation tools, businesses can bridge the gap between office-based legacy systems and remote workspaces.

d) Self-service options for customers

The adoption of self-service tools has seen a rapid rise in recent years. 59% of customers were reported to prefer resolving their queries themselves when it concerns simple queries. With traditional phone and email channels witnessing a dip of 19% and 17%, respectively in the past two years, additional self-service options have witnessed a tremendous rise during the same period, video channels (43%), discussion forums (30%), text/SMS (9%), customer portal (3%) 

It is quite clear from the survey findings that organizations adopting automation technologies have a demarcated advantage in terms of cost-effectiveness, customer satisfaction, and agent relief. While the pandemic has been majorly responsible for giving the requisite boost to its adoption, the trend will only catch up in the coming years.