Customer service professionals in e-commerce and other sectors know what they’re up against – demanding customers who want to be treated as unique individuals and have their hopes, dreams, needs, and challenges. These customers want to be recognized and acknowledged. They also want to be served quickly via personalized interactions with friendly and knowledgeable customer support agents.
Many e-commerce customer service teams have made an effort to satisfy these new consumer preferences and needs. They are also trying to deliver meaningful service experiences based on changing consumer behaviors.
So what does the future have in-store e-commerce customer service?
How will consumer behaviors shape customer service over the next 10, 20, or 30 years?
Our all-new series talks about the evolved customer service in the future. Here’s the first of the two.
Bots Elevating the “Human” Aspect
Currently, a consumer is drastically influenced by “bots.” Their inclination toward voice bots and chatbots makes their minds tech-savvy, and nothing can explain this better than the Genesys survey on connected customer experience. Understanding the current reality, the survey depicts that 43% of respondents use live webchat to interact with customer service and 54% of customers are strongly inclined toward voice and chatbots. It’s evident that voice is the most frequent channel to interact with brands’ customer service departments. However, changing consumer preferences and behaviors will drive the increasing popularity of digital channels like chatbots and voice bots.
Although most chatbots (and voice bots) of today are not that intelligent to offer a quality service experience, they can strike contextual conversations to interact with customers and assist them in dealing with common issues based on some predetermined logic and pre-set answers.
But over the next few decades, conversational AI and chatbot technology are set to make huge advances. As technology evolves, machines will auto-learn more about consumer behaviors and preferences. They will tailor their answers based on these preferences and their own “judgment.” They are expected to show all signs of a bot that is emotionally intelligent. Therefore, we can assume that chatbots and voice bots will become mainstream in e-commerce support teams and work alongside human agents to deliver richer customer experiences with each interaction.
“Digital At The Core” Will Become the Norm in Future
In the coming years, more e-commerce brands will pivot to “digital at the core” to accommodate customers’ demand for digital interactions. Their customer service departments will offer more self-service digital channels than they did in the past. Moreover, customers and service agents will be able to switch smoothly between channels without impacting the service experience. To do this, they will implement some wealthy omnichannel strategies focused on each individual customer. Support teams will have conversations that start on one channel and continue on others as per the preferences of the customers.
Brands will also pay more attention to customer journeys and the ways in which they will evolve. They will use a vast quantity of customer data, including previous transactions, history of customer service exchanges, and preferred contact channels, to better understand customer expectations and predict their behaviors. They will leverage this contextual and individualized information to create an integrated view of each customer that enables them to engage in candid conversations and thus deliver truly connected and memorable brand experiences.
Blockchain and E-commerce Customer Support
Many e-commerce firms think of blockchain in the same breath as cryptocurrencies. However, that’s only a subset of blockchain technology. In future years, blockchain will play an increasingly important role in e-commerce customer support.
In the future, e-commerce companies will be able to execute every transaction with every customer through blockchain-powered smart contracts. Each contract with clear payment and other transaction terms will be stored on a company’s blockchain. The contract will get executed automatically when certain predetermined conditions are met, for instance, when a customer clicks on the “Buy Now” button.
Both participants in the transaction – the e-commerce company and the customer – will be certain of the outcome and won’t have to waste time or bicker over terms related to prices, discounts, shipping, etc. Consequently, the brand’s customer support team won’t have to field as many calls from miffed customers about the price of a product or the company’s refusal to provide free shipping.
Effectively this seems that the customer support team will deal with lesser mundane calls which will give them more time to understand customer issues and offer hyper-personalized solutions that are enriched with empathy, consideration, and emotional connection – all key components to building a positive brand image in the mind of a customer in distress.
Conclusion
The momentum of digitization in customer service has picked up after the pandemic. In this new era, consumers live, work, play, and shop differently. E-commerce companies must understand these changing consumer behaviors and preferences – and adjust their models and delivery mechanisms accordingly.
They must also update their customer service offerings. One reason is that a majority of consumers (70%) believe that a business is “only as good” as its customer service. Further, one in every three says that dealing with customer service is “always a hassle” for them. These expectations and opinions around customer support are not going anywhere, so e-commerce firms should keep them in mind as they optimize their support functions.
After summing up the changes in customer service, we plan to dig deep in our next segment!
In the meanwhile, if you need support or consultation about ways to optimize your e-commerce brand’s customer support department, contact Ergode.
