Weak mobile customer service is harming customer engagement, and IT leaders will have to innovate when it comes to engaging customers on all channels, according to Gartner.
"Marketing may fill the sales funnel, and the sales department can close a deal, yet it is the overall impression of the enterprise generated by the quality of customer service that differentiates one enterprise from another," said Michael Maoz, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
This is easier said than done however, and Maoz admits that this entails transforming the definition of customer service from its typical perception of an isolated function, into an enterprise objective across all customer contain points--including on mobile devices.
Gartner has highlighted a couple of upcoming developments with regards to customer service.
Human intermediary still needed
For all the technological advancements and intelligence agent tools being rolled out to reduce customer support interactions that require a human to solve, Gartner thinks that one third of all customer service interactions will still require the support of a human intermediary when 2017 comes around.
While nearly 60% of customer service interactions required the intervention of a human support agent in 2014, Gartner predicts that this will be cut nearly in half over the next 24 months through more radical self-service, communities, alerts and mobile devices.
Ironically, it is this rapid pace of automation, that an organization with an eye on personalized customer experiences would find themselves retaining a highly trained core of customer service professionals.
"Businesses need to focus on what key customer experiences would benefit from customer engagement with a human," said Maoz, who highlighted the need to ensure the availability of a human customer support representative in places where they can make the difference between “a sale or no sale, the acceptance of an offer or its rejection, and/or a quality customer experience.”
Device-initiated customer service cases
Thanks to the growing momentum towards the Internet of Things (IoT), Gartner thinks that 5% percent of customer service cases will be initiated by Internet-connected devices by 2018, up from a mere 0.02% in 2014.
With the installed base of “things” expected to grow to 26 billion units in 2020—even excluding PCs, tablets and smartphones, expect many of these to serve as agents for services that are currently requested through people. On the upside, device-initiated customer service cases would make it easier to monitor operations, statuses, service levels and other metrics.
"The explosive growth of the IoT and associated use cases will bring a transformational change in the customer service space." said Olive Huang, research director at Gartner.
"A number of industries will be the front runners in this trend, such as manufacturing, healthcare providers, insurance, banking and securities, retail and wholesale, computing services, government, transportation, utilities, real estate and business services, agriculture and communications."