Ideal and applicable to all business scenarios—when businesses get to know the customers, it becomes easier to understand what they need to grow. If you rewind 15 years, you would remember the main street businesses that were locally owned and operated. Most of the time, these owners knew the shopping habits and preferences of their customers. And if they didn’t, they were more than willing to find it out.

Emphasizing that gesture, Get to Know your Customers Day came into existence. The day is observed annually each quarter each year in January, April, July, and October.

This year, it falls on the following dates: January 16, 2020; April 16, 2020; July 16, 2020; and October 15, 2020.

Since there are a lot of online stores operating and competing around, it is significant for all to know a little more about the customers. Most importantly, always make them feel like a very important customer throughout the day, in short, like a king. A lot is coming up in the field of customer service these days, and one of the prominent and highlighted things is the service technology.

What is Service Technology?

It refers to a software that assists customer teams in achieving customer success. It improves workflow efficiency while making it easier for companies to provide effective solutions to their customers. Therefore, adopting service technology ultimately helps companies to understand the need of customers and provide them outstanding customer service in return.

Thus, keep reading how service technology plans to handle the perspective of customers and businesses.The last decade has shown great progress in the video, real-time messaging, chatbots, cryptocurrencies, and even self-service. And ever since, technology has become an intrinsic part of life – deeply embedded in how government, businesses, and people work and live.

Personalized experience is leading

One way technology has changed the scenario is by giving customers the upper hand to witness things with their perspective. The audiences are now active participants as they no longer have to experience a service but be a part of true collaboration.

By giving immersive and meaningful experiences is how leading businesses are connecting with their customers. But, with growing personalized experience in services, people are also becoming concerned about their data and security.

Pointing toward the emerging technologies, namely 5G and AR (Augmented Reality), they have the potential to customize experience across people’s lives. However, it requires the support and dedication of leaders to make it successful throughout. So, those who can imbibe technologies, such as AR (Augmented Reality) and 5G, in their business will lay down the foundation for long-term success.

Real-time messaging wins over emails

No, emails won’t come to an end.

But considering that we are in an era where people love to interact via chat, businesses should reflect the same. Now, you can interact with businesses in real-time, and Facebook will show their average responsiveness. The expectation of high-responsiveness is not only for Facebook Messenger or Slack, but on-site conversations and chats are expected to be real-time, i.e., 1:1. The world operates in synchronous time, and thus, businesses need to amp up their communication technologies and strategies.

Not replacing emails though, it is and shall always be our go-to medium for sharing important documents and communication.

Bots helping professionals (not replacing them)

Robots have the potential to increase the reach and responsibility of the enterprise. It is reported that companies in every sector will unlock new opportunities by introducing robots to the next frontier, the open world. The near term opportunity with bots is two-fold, bots are there where you can’t be, like when the customer service team is asleep. Second, bots improve the self-service and reduce expenses for the vendors.

Also, in the next 10–25 years, this technology will continue to make huge advancements. It will be capable of doing what humans are doing today. It will be a gamechanger when customer reps have to give repeated answers to the same issue over and over again. But, it will not replace the customer reps as they will deal with situations that bots can’t handle. Therefore, leaders need to allocate customer reps to better positions and drive them to work for the long-term success of the organization.

Self-service stays

Most of the vendors with whom the average customer interacts with nowadays are big and technically strong such as Amazon, Google, Walmart, and so on. They are embracing self-service as it reduces their cost of doing business, but while doing so, they are also pushing the sophisticated methods of customer interaction. Think about a business that is still asking you to put your query and concern on the phone or email. In the world where you can do it with messenger bots or location-aware mobile apps, why not reflect that you’re distancing technology.

To help them in multiple ways, and set the right example of customer service, build up a knowledge base. It is the place where you can write answers to common questions, which the consumers can easily find on Google. To save some time of your customer reps, you can easily opt for this.

Social media as a standard tool

We all are trying or habitual of writing down the review of some newly explored restaurants and salons. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter for giving us that moment of release.

Social media has given a lot of power in the hands of customers as they can instantly criticize a brand on a public forum. One bad customer review that is recorded can be seen by millions of people, and it is a well-proven fact that at least 60% of individuals trust their peers’ opinions. The impact of review places pressure on businesses to come up with consistent and effective response plans.

Thus, companies need to have their social media accounts to handle customer service situations. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will become a viable option for the customers to submit their feedback, and thus companies need to engage with the customers on their online turf.

Closing thought

The significance of customer service is not going out of trend anytime soon. However, technologies are coming and going out of the picture. The above listed are some of the technologies that will dominate the world of businesses and customer service shortly. These are some of the directions companies can take to shift and accentuate the experience of their potential and existing customers.

No matter how efficient is your business offering, the power of interacting and close collaboration with the customers can never be replaced. The user experience is the single measurement for the quality of any given solution or service, including IT services. That’s why “Get To Know Your Customers Day” is a special day!