We surveyed a number of customer service/experience leaders, from many of today’s leading brands, in our community to get their predictions for 2018. Over the coming weeks we will be releasing their thoughts on specific CX topics including customer expectations, channels, operations, technology, use case studies/data, and security/risk.
Click here to catch up on Part 1 – Customer Expectations and Part 2 – Channels.
The third installment of this series focuses on thoughts on operations.
•Further advancements in the area of personalization of the experience. The ability to leverage “big data” sources to create a more personalized experience. Driving demand for analytic platforms, as well as analytic resources (both offshore and onshore).
• Expansion of the work at home (work anywhere) models for care support for cost savings. Advancements of tools and technology to support this.
• ‘Employee engagement’ truly changing culture.
• Customer service must be able to show ROI to adopt messaging channels and chatbots for customer interactions.
• Companies will begin to focus more on the entire customer lifecycle from acquisition, to sales, to service/support. The lines will blur between organizational siloes that focus on acquisition and those that focus on customer care, as businesses embrace a more holistic approach.
• Business leaders will get better at overcoming common, but large, digital transformation challenges (e.g., data silos, governance, systems integration, executive buy-in, acquisitions, technologies, security, etc). This will enable them to develop better customer insights that are actionable, to improve the customer experience, as well as optimize business operations.
• Businesses will drastically adopt and improve how they apply predictive analytics across the enterprise.
• Businesses will further embrace outsource service providers as strategic partners vs. traditional labor arbitrage.
• The usage of behavior profiles will go mainstream in marketing and customer service.
• Companies realizing that they need to center operations, technologies and practices around people and customers, not case numbers and ticketing systems. Leveraging modern technology to replace legacy systems will take time, but brands realize they need to start now to execute on their 3-5 year vision.
Stay tuned next week for Part 4 – Technology.
