Will You Keep Up With These Five Customer Service Trends in 2017?

With the season of giving behind us, ’tis the season for predictions and trends. And, as in all niches, thought leaders in the area of customer service are already buzzing with their own personal forecasts of the year ahead.

[Just in case readers are wondering, I’m not one of these thought leaders, but I am an avid follower of the interplay between companies and customers, of which customer service is certainly a hugely importance piece. After all, customer service is one of those few direct touch points with customers; the quality of a customer service experience, or the lack thereof, can move the relationship in big ways.]

Interestingly, all the chatter in the area of customer service is fairly uniform: continued improvement on the trends of yesteryear and bracing for trends to come.

This chatter should also give any company out there a benchmark to hit when it comes to their own customer service/experience. They give a window into the latest and greatest ways companies are attempting to adapt to current trends in demographics, technology, and cultural shifts to connect with customers in positive ways.

If you are serious about keeping pace with your competitors and peers, these are five trends you’re going to want to keep up with in 2017:

1. Polishing up touch points

Remember the clunky customer service experience of yesteryear, where companies kept you navigating an endless phone tree, trying to find a helpful human to talk to? Well, this isn’t going to fly with 2017 consumers.

Thanks to the explosion in sleek, easy-to-use technology and the influx of millennials into adulthood, says Forbes contributor Micah Solomon, companies will have to rise to a new level of user-friendliness in their customer service processes — or risk losing to those companies that will:

“The relentless focus on simplifying the user interface at Apple, Amazon, Google and other less visible technology players has set a new standard of intuitiveness across the tech industry that millennials accept as the norm. Businesses should be careful not to throw clunky, alienating technology, systems, or processes at these customers and expect patience or understanding as customers struggle to find a workaround.”

2. Going big with bots

To meet all of the needs of customers in an intelligent way in 2017, many customer service experts are saying that humans just aren’t enough. There are just so many ways that customers want to communicate with companies that staffing all of these channels with competent people is becoming burdensome. But what if they can program robots to man (pun intended) these many channels for them?

Enter Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). While bots have been laughably, well, robotic in the past, and a turnoff to customers, advances in the technology are getting close to mimicking the voices, vocabulary, and intuition of actual humans. Most top online retailers, for instance, are already using A.I. to run their website chats, and most customers hardly recognize the difference.

Experts are predicting that customer service A.I. will go big in 2017, with bots responding to customer support emails or fielding phone calls. And while the bots are resolving customer complaints, say some experts, they will also learn to spot patterns that signal that a complaint is incoming before a customer even speaks up.

Of course, this is a tall order to fill, and much of it is still only theoretical. Sven Ri at Userlike points out:

“Chatbots have received plenty of limelight in 2016. The big question of 2017 is whether they’ll be able to live up to their promises for customer service.”

Will A.I. finally live up to the hype or will customers see right through the facade? Will they care? Will these bots be able to build the same loyal relationships with customers as humans can? 2017 just might be the year we find out.

3. Beefing up social customer service

Up until now, customer service via social media has been the domain of the elite, the Jetblues and Whole Foods of the world. The practice has been regarded with envy by other customer service-minded companies, but perhaps not with too much urgency to adopt it. However, thanks to the growing purchasing power of millennials — and the burgeoning numbers of people who insist on getting their customer service needs taken care of on Facebook, Twitter, etc. — companies might not have a choice.

According to research by Convince & Convert, 42% of customers who reach out to companies on social media expect a response from companies within 60 minutes; 32% expect that response on 30 minutes or less.

If experts and these statistics are right, customer service via call center and chat will just not be enough in 2017. It might be time to teach your customer service (or your bots) how to tweet.

4. Stalking customers

While the idea of personalization has been a hot topic and a holy grail for customer-facing companies for the last few years, it will be a major theme in 2017. More than ever, customers will expect an experience where they don’t have to reintroduce themselves and their needs every time they do business with companies. They want companies to recognize them and act accordingly, and companies will need to do some serious customer-stalking to make this happen.

In 2017, this stalking will be done by machines, according to Forbes customer experience contributor Blake Morgan:

“Machine learning is a powerful way to access information about your customers in order to personalize the experience to meet their needs. Machine learning can access huge data sets through the cloud, including data your company might not collect itself, such as social media analytics and information from retailers. The cloud allows users to aggregate huge amounts of data to give instant insights and predictive analysis.”

Of course, to avoid creeping out customers with said stalking, companies will need to make sure their customers know the extent to which they are being watched.

“Customers will readily share their preferences with firms they trust, but reciprocity requires firms to be both transparent with their policies and practices and focused on providing a tailored customer experience,” says Richard Shapiro at The Center For Client Retention.

5. Rethinking omnichannel

Like A.I. the omnichannel experience — the idea that customers expect to be treated and served the same way regardless of how they connect with your company, via phone, store, chat, etc. — is a concept that has been thrown around for years, almost ad nauseam. And for just as long, companies have been tripping over themselves to strengthen their customer experience in every possible channel, even as those channels grow and multiply year over year.

According to some experts, though, 2017 might be the year when companies rethink omnichannel. Ri argues:

“[W]hile the pursuit of omnichannel is right, its costs are high…Then there’s also the issue of decision fatigue. While a certain spectrum of contact options is desirable (e.g. email, phone, live chat), it’s not necessarily the more the better. As you increase the choice, mental effort rises…Instead of offering more channels and integrating them, the customer experience could benefit from clear guidance to fewer channels — and doing those few channels very well.”

If your company is already on the omnichannel bandwagon, 2017 might be the year to reconsider how you’re integrating customer service across channels — and possibly spreading yourself too thin — and which channels you can focus on to deliver better.

So back to the key question with any set of predictions: Will they actually come true? Every year, thought leaders in every niche of every sector release their own lists of prognostications for the coming year. Some of these will be based on past trends, some will be pie-in-the-sky guesses, just to be the person who said it (in case it actually comes true). Some of these predictions will come true, most won’t.

But perhaps, with predictions, the fun is not in the probability that they will come true, but in the “wouldn’t-it be-cool-if-it-did-come-true” of it all.

Then the only remaining question for you is, will you make it a point to keep up with these so-called customer service trends of 2017 or will you blaze your own path? Perhaps only time will tell.