Customer Support Channels are Changing
June 11, 2013
By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor
Interactive voice response (IVR) has come a long way. Experts are predicting that the familiar process of calling a toll-free number and speaking with an agent will largely disappear in the next decade, and one of the big catalysts for this change is IVR.
“Technology is taking us further away from the phone,” said Christina Morris, a managing director for Xerox. “I think that self-service is where people want to get to. Customer service — we can’t just say it’s what happens in a call center. It has to happen at every touchpoint.”
Self-service is the direction of things when it comes to customer service, and that includes calls.
On the calling side, this is largely because IVR has evolved far from its early days when it would frustrate callers and serve as a gatekeeper between the caller and the agent.
“The failure in the past is that it hasn’t always been robust enough and it’s led to a lot of frustration,” said Morris. “It really kind of comes back to ‘it has to be simple and it has to work.’ The options have to be very clear … if you’re going to do voice recognition, it has to be with a high degree of accuracy.”
Nobody wants to say yes, no, yes to get their customer service needs addressed, but IVR has reached a point where it almost feels like the caller is speaking to a live representative. This then delivers much of the benefits of talking with a live rep but without the hassles of having to wait for an agent to take a call.
In our increasingly screen-based world, it also gives the customer a gentler avenue for support on those days when they just don’t want to talk with a live person on the other end of the phone.
Other factors in the move away from agent-caller customer support are the emergence of customer support apps as a viable support solution, and virtual device interventions that cut down on support needs.
Device-specific diagnosis websites, similar to what customers might experience on a site such as WebMD, are starting to replace calls to agents and FAQ on websites.
With the app-ification of just about everything, customer service apps will further help move customers away from talking directly with an agent.
Dedicated support apps and in-app features such as “talk with an agent” buttons are increasingly being preferred over placing a call. This makes sense: If you are banking from your phone and you have a question, it is a lot easier to also get an answer to your question by clicking a button in the corner of the app you currently are using than to find a support number, call it, wait for a rep and then explain the problem.
So while the need for customer support won’t ever go away, the channels for getting support are definitely changing.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey