Part 3 — A new type of customer service company
In my last post, I talked about our mission to improve customer service across the world and create lots of jobs. In this post, I will talk about how we plan to do this over the next 10 years.
Step #1 — Focus on messaging
In today’s world, billions of people use messaging apps such as SMS, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc to communicate with their friends and family. Despite this, the majority of customer support still happens over the phone. Companies that have adopted chat and social media for customer care have discovered that messaging is more cost effective than phone and delivers a better customer experience in many situations.
We want every customer in the world to get great service from every business that they interact with. We are going to do this by creating software and solutions that help companies deliver better customer service with messaging apps.
Step #2 — Apply automation
Have you ever sent a chat or a Tweet to a company? When I’ve tried it and the response is unhelpful or slow, I’m disappointed and the company loses my trust. On the other hand, when they answer my question or solve my issue quickly, it’s awesome! I typically find someone nearby to tell them about the positive experience I had with the company.
Many companies struggle to keep up with the increasing volume of customer questions and complaints. At the same time, delivering high quality service over messaging gives businesses new opportunities to strengthen their relationships with customers and grow their sales.
We will provide automation and machine learning to augment the work of customer service agents and help companies better anticipate the needs of their customers. Our software will free up agents from common and repetitive tasks. Agents will have more time to spend on ensuring a consistently excellent experience for every customer.
Step #3 — Create lots of jobs
The customer service industry employs millions of people around the world. In the US alone, there are 2.6 million customer service representatives and these numbers are projected to grow by at least 10% in the next 8 years.
We hope to add many more jobs to this industry. Our software will make it fast and cost effective to hire and train high quality customer service teams. Our goal is to create these new “digital jobs” in large areas of unemployment in the US and eventually everywhere in the world.
There are a lot of hard problems to solve here. For example, we need to build trust with companies that a distributed workforce can deliver high customer satisfaction. We also need to build systems that can match the demand to supply of trained agents in order to ensure that customers always get fast and high quality service.
Some people think that robots and Artificial Intelligence will develop sufficiently to replace customer service jobs entirely. I’m more optimistic about the future. I believe that as technology advances, customer needs get more complex. People increasingly value a personal touch and a human connection. Many companies offer self service kiosks, websites, mobile apps, chatbots and more. Yet, people keep calling customer support.
Starting small but solving a big problem
The first customer service problem we are solving is “waiting on hold.”
A lot of times you call a company and then you wait on hold… When this takes a long time, it can be a frustrating experience. Americans spend 900 million hours annually waiting on hold and it costs companies $6–8 on average every time you speak to an agent on the phone.
Our first product solves this by enabling people to communicate with customer service via messaging instead of waiting on hold. We call it “Social Shift.”
You can learn more about the product on our website — Chatdesk.com. We went live with our first customer last week! It’s still early days but the results are promising so far. Social Shift doesn’t solve unemployment but it improves the customer experience and lays a foundation for us to do more in the future.
Do you have any friends who work in customer service? Please put us in touch with them! It would be great to get their feedback and advice on what we are working on. Thank you!
