Dive Brief:
- Customer support capabilities can make or break an enterprise’s reputation, and as CIOs plan to enhance systems and processes, end user expectations are rising. One in 5 consumers would switch to a competitor after one negative experience, a Morning Consult survey commissioned by Zoom of 2,200 adults found.
- Almost all — 9 in 10 — consumers say customer support should include accurate resolution and knowledgeable representatives, according to a Morning Consult survey commissioned by Zoom of 2,200 adults.
- But, that’s not the experience most are having. Less than three-quarters of consumers say they have actually been assisted by knowledgeable representatives, and slightly fewer say their problems were solved, according to the report.
Dive Insight:
Consumers and business employees expect user-friendly technology, and tech leaders know there is room for improvement.
Nearly 4 in 5 CIOs say they’ll increase spending on customer experience this year, a recent Logicalis report found.
Customer experience is vital. Without user-friendly technology that accurately assists the end user, businesses risk customer attrition.
“I think what consumers want today is quite different than it was even 10 years ago,” Mahesh Ram, head of digital customer experience at Zoom, said. “What we are also seeing is that companies are starting to look at all kinds of ways in which they can streamline [processes], and we’ve seen recently companies eliminating the ability to get to a live human support completely, which is a radical shift.”
Chatbots have become more and more popular as enterprises look for more efficient end-user touchpoints for customer support. But the technology has limitations.
Less than one-third of end users say chatbots often or always successfully resolve their issues, and more than half say they often or always need to contact a customer support employee after the chatbot, according to the Morning Consult survey.
“If you give people a positive experience with self service and automation, you can make your business more efficient,” Ram said. “But you can do it really badly and have the opposite experience.”
With the rise of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, businesses are looking at ways to enhance services, systems and processes by adding in the technology for both internal and external end user interactions.
“[An enterprise] could train a large language model on their specific processes, their procedures, their data and they could come up with a conversational AI tool that would interact with customers cheaply and effectively in a way that can’t really be done with existing chatbot solutions,” Jeremy Roberts, research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said during a webinar in December.
Internally, a conversational AI tool could serve as backend to an information environment or concierge that can crawl an existing database and provide answers to people who have questions, according to Roberts.
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect Mahesh Ram is the head of digital customer experience at Zoom.
