What Is Intelligent Customer Service?

The future of customer service

As companies work diligently to engage their customers in new and varied ways, many find it harder than ever to provide the personalized and effortless service experiences their customers crave. Why? Because additive technology can complicate rather than simplify an already complex architecture, and it becomes increasingly difficult to share information across channels, drive informed decisions, and remain agile in an ever-evolving ecosystem.

Intelligent customer service can change all that. Organizations powered by intelligent customer service can create a true engagement experience that is more than the sum of its parts. The most elegant service solutions can be created only when they’re informed by service intelligence, which guides business decisions and behavior with relevant and timely data-driven insights.

With an intelligent customer service solution in place, businesses can deliver intent-driven outcomes in a secure, flexible, reliable environment. Intelligent customer service helps drive effortless experiences for customers and offers unparalleled productivity within an organization. Put plainly, it’s the future of customer service.

Learn 4 key strategic considerations for an evolved customer service org

Not just multichannel—omni-channel

Today’s customers may want to check the status of an order on the web, use self-service to answer common questions and learn best practices, or track an existing issue while it moves toward resolution. They may need to connect directly with an agent or may even require field service.

But the omni-channel experience is about more than social engagement via the channel of the customer’s choice. It’s about two-way communication. It’s about empowering companies to engage proactively with their customers through appropriate channels.

Customer service agents need visibility into customer records—including case history and preferences—in real time so they can personalize every single interaction. Intelligent customer service strategies facilitate effective omni-channel interactions by unifying the experience across self-, assisted-, and field-service channels.

Enabling the right kind of power trip

How many times have you entered your personal information in an online chat only to have your issue escalated to a phone call with an agent who asks for the same information again?

When agents can’t access the right resources—including insight into previous interactions—service satisfaction plummets. Complex service environments leverage multiple applications and systems of record. Poor or limited access to those resources negatively affects every part of an agent’s performance: agents are slower to find solutions, they’re not empowered to make the best decisions, and they’re unlikely to drive customer satisfaction.

An intelligent service solution integrates every resource an agent needs to be effective into a single intuitive, dynamic interface that serves up the right tools, guidance, and data to agents.

It’s not just a matter of offering a 360-degree view of the customer. Complete customer case records with historical interactions are vital, but intelligent customer service software also provides real-time insights, so agents can manage cases faster and provide an unprecedented level of support—no matter when or how a customer reaches out.

Read the whitepaper to learn more about the future of customer service

Big brains at every level

It’s common for service leaders to feel like they have only partial visibility into service performance. Without help from a business analyst, wading through existing data to chart service performance and progress is overwhelming.

Business intelligence empowers people at every level of an organization by providing insights unique to each position:

• Agents have visibility into things like Service Level Agreements and customer satisfaction scores.

• Managers can appropriately allocate resources based on popular channels, trending issues, and skill sets.

• Knowledge administrators can see exactly how knowledge is being used, curate content based on usefulness and ratings, and create new content in support of trending issues.
  

• Directors can make decisions based on advanced analytics that don't require an additional expert to parse, and deliver concrete, actionable information to executives both inside and outside the service organization

And—with a smart software solution bolstered by service intelligence—companies can quickly identify and solve trending problems, track progress against KPIs, and forecast customer needs.

The future is now

All of this is possible with intelligent customer service. It’s time for you to create a strategy that will align your business processes, and we have resources to get you there. The goal is clear: satisfy customer experience expectations now and for the next decade.

Start building a strategy for intelligent customer service