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Your Guide to Optimizing Online Customer Service in the Technology Industry

online customer serviceProviding exceptional online customer service is now essential for technology companies (really all companies in all industries) to satisfy and retain users in an increasingly digital world. However, delivering seamless support across websites, mobile apps, social media, webchat, help centers and emerging channels is complex. Yet at the same time, it is demanded by hyper-connected customers.

With customer expectations rising and new technologies advancing rapidly, support organizations are struggling to keep pace. Those that can, are reaping the rewards of higher levels of customer loyalty and profitability, while reducing customer service costs. While companies that aren’t reacting as quickly are being punished. As customers become more accustomed to using digital and online tools, they appreciate the speed and delivery of information and experiences. That expectation will extend to all elements of the online experience, including customer service and support.

This comprehensive guide explores proven strategies and best practices for technology companies to optimize online customer service delivery in today’s omnichannel environment.

Conduct In-Depth Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Mapping involves mapping out the path that a customer takes from first becoming aware of your product, to purchasing it. This link gives you a good breakdown and definition of customer journey mapping. The advantage of mapping the customer journey from a support perspective is it helps you identify potential pain points in the purchase process for the customer. Once the potential problem areas are known, they can be addressed and responses can be proactively created. Considerations include:

  • Creating detailed journey maps for key processes including onboarding, adoption, training, troubleshooting and escalation. This helps you identify friction points at each step from the user perspective. Knowing those potential pain points makes it much easier to address them, leading to higher levels of customer loyalty.
  • Conducting extensive ethnographic research through surveys, interviews and observations to uncover unmet needs and grievances directly from customers. Customer feedback is vital to optimizing and improving support processes.
  • Completing comprehensive audits examining support metrics across platforms – response times, wait times, resolution quality, customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and more. Tracking metrics throughout the customer journey allows your technology company to identify strengths and weaknesses throughout the process.  Once identified, weaknesses can be corrected and strengths magnified.
  • Analyzing support case topics and types to reveal knowledge gaps. Expand help content to address common questions. This is where tracking satisfaction with support as well as time spent with agents can reveal potential problem areas. Consistent problems could point to a need to invest in training and/or the hiring of SMEs.

If leveraged correctly, these insights will inform an omnichannel customer service optimization roadmap tailored to your customers’ needs.

Design Integrated Omnichannel Experiences

Today’s consumers expect unified support experiences across the web, mobile apps, social media, email, chat, and emerging channels. Eliminate friction through thoughtful omnichannel design:

  • Define optimal roles for each channel based on strengths. Chat for convenience, phone for urgent issues, forums for troubleshooting. This also helps you consider the needs of the customer, for instance forums should have access to SMEs who can answer questions that are often involving a more complex issue. One answer from a SME could potentially deflect multiple CS calls, which would be a cost savings that would continue to be realized as long as the answer appeared on the forum.
  • Craft tight channel integration, such as website support forms prefilled with user data for contextual experiences. Make sure to collect only the data that customers have consented for collction, and carefully explain to customers which data will be collected. This helps address privacy concerns and works to establish trust.
  • Enable smooth cross-channel transitions, such as handing off conversations between agents without repetitive explanations. Remember that the customer assumes the entire interaction with CS is being conducted by a team that’s on the same page, not disjointed employees.  The customer doesn’t expect to have to start over with a fresh explanation of the problem every time a new agent is involved.
  • Connect steps into one seamless, consistent and personalized cross-channel customer journey.

Contextual, continuous omnichannel experiences satisfy users and improve efficiency while increasing loyalty.

Evaluate and Adopt New Service Channels

The digital service landscape evolves quickly. Continuously evaluate and pilot new channels and innovations such as:

  • Artificial Intelligence powered chatbots equipped with natural language capabilities, sentiment analysis and escalation for automated conversations.  This post has a detailed breakdown of how technology companies can leverage AI in customer support. AI can be used to deliver customer support directly, and it can also be leveraged to analyze customer data to enhance the support experience.
  • Augmented reality that allows remote visual issue diagnosis through overlays and annotations. This is especially useful in the field service spac, where a remote worker can use AR to diagnose and fix a problem directly, or be connected to a SME (Subject Matter Expert) who can help the technician deliver support on site, saving time for both the customer and service vendor.
  • In-product communications via embedded commentary forms or help widgets. QR are a useful example of this, allowing both the customer and the service technician to get relevant product information at the site.
  • Proactive assistance powered by machine learning models that predict issues. This ties into the first point about AI, machine-learning can also be utilized to predict potential problems, turning costly repairs into preventative maintenance.

Assess new technologies based on your capabilities and customers’ evolving needs. Adopt channels that provide high value.

Incentivize Use of Self-Service Options

Deflecting common inquiries to self-help resources reduces human support costs. Boost adoption by:

  • Identifying key opportunities to augment or replace live service, such as leveraging virtual agents or community forums.  Pro-Tip: Publish some of the most engaging forum answers on your website’s homepage. This is a great way to promote the availability of the forum as a way for the user to self-troubleshoot problems. Remember that one answer from a SME on a forum could help countless users solve the same problem. Every time a user can solve their own problem via a forum, that deflects a call or chat with a CS agent. Which saves you money.
  • Designing stellar help centers, FAQs, chat bots, online communities, and in-product self-service. Make sure every level of service is provided for the user. If the user needs 101-level help, provide FAQs, if they need a bit more instruction, give them easy access to chat bots and forums.
  • Driving awareness through promotions, in-product prompts, and informational content. Users can’t access help if they don’t know it’s available. Providing exceptional online customer service is about giving customers the ability to choose the type of experience that’s most helpful and convenient for them.
  • Continuously optimizing self-service content and functionality based on analytics and user feedback. Constantly monitor for roadblocks and bottlenecks in the process. Survey users post-ticket to identify areas for improvement.

Giving customers self-service options that work leads to higher customer loyalty and satisfaction, as well as reduces costs for your technology company.

Experiment, Iterate and Innovate

Customer service cannot remain stagnant as user expectations rapidly evolve. Continually optimize by:

  • A/B testing new features and support processes to improve key metrics. Leverage community forums and give the most active participants the chance to test new features. You will often find that frequent contributors to forums will jump at such an opportunity.
  • Monitoring emerging innovations in service delivery from competitors. Be aware of what the competition is doing, and what is working for them. This can give you ideas for improvement in your own CS processes.
  • Interviewing users to identify desired improvements and pain points. Lean on feedback from users throughout the customer support process. You will often find that users will be happy to provide feedback and stay in contact with your CS team to help implement their suggestions.
  • Proactively journey mapping to uncover friction opportunities. Find and identify pain points for users along the CS journey, and eliminate them.
  • Piloting enhancements, measuring impact based on data, and iterating. Pro-tip: Rollout changes first to your forum members or loyalty program members. If you will be providing a new features in your customer support efforts, give limited advance access to certain user segments. This will be viewed as a perk by the group, and will result in better feedback and higher levels of satisfaction and loyalty as a result.

The best brands continually and proactively adapt based on customer needs and feedback.

Achieving Excellent Online Customer Service

Providing superior omnichannel customer service is challenging yet invaluable. Applying the strategies outlined equips technology companies to meet, and even exceed, rising user expectations.

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Apple’s Vision Pro Reveal Could Signal the Coming Integration of AI Into AR/VR

If there’s one space where the technology hasn’t yet caught the promise, it’s Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).  The promise is there, but the delivery, especially in terms of hardware, is lacking. The main focus has been delivering AR/VR experiences via headsets that are clunky at best, and can easily cause disorientation and headaches at worst.

Nevertheless, Apple announced that it is getting in the AR/VR headset game yesterday at its Worldwide Developers Conference with the introduction of Vision Pro.

The price tag immediately jumps out at you: $3,500.00.  And it won’t be available till early next year. But it’s an Apple product, so it will sell amazingly well, I am sure.  And one limitation of other headsets has been addressed; the weight of the Vision Pro is roughly a pound. That’s lighter than competitors, but even a pound of weight on your head will wear you out after a while.

Still, the introduction of the Vision Pro will encourage competitors to up their game as well. And I think the huge $3,500 price tag could be a boon for the space, as it will give competitors more runway in developing their own headset. Instead of a headset, what about a pair of AR/VR glasses that weighs only 6 ounces and costs $899 instead of $3500? The beefy price tag of the Vision Pro, and early 2024 release date, gives competitors more options. And that should ultimately benefit consumers.

So How Could Artificial Intelligence Fit Into AR/VR?

A few weeks ago on Twitter, I spotted a developer with a very interesting application. If you have used ChatGPT before, you may have noticed that you can tell it to give you an answer ‘in the style of’ a particular person or character. You can ask ChatGPT to answer a question for you, and it will.  Then you could ask ChatGPT to answer that same question, but ‘answer as a drunken pirate’ and it will.

The developer I saw on Twitter had taken this idea and incorporated it to have ChatGPT output its answers as if it were Steve Jobs. Someone left a comment saying they could see the potential of this, perhaps you could add other people to this, so you could have a virtual conversation with maybe family members. The developer remarked that this idea was exactly what he had in mind, he explained that his father had died at a young age, and he was incorporating his father’s persona into ChatGPT in order to have a ‘virtual conversation’ with his father now that he is an adult. This type of implementation could be seen as very cool or very scary, depending on your point of view.

Nevertheless, this idea of incorporating a real person’s persona via AI and outputting their responses is interesting to explore. If you add in the delivery of the persona via an AR/VR headset, the possibilities are endless:

  • A field service worker could have his boss ‘on site’ with him via AI in his AR/VR headset so he can assist the worker in diagnosing a problem with a field unit and walk the worker through how to fix it.
  • A teenager could watch a Taylor Swift concert on her birthday, and in between songs, Taylor stops to sing her Happy Birthday!
  • A marketer could join a workshop on AI where the presenter can stop the presentation to answer questions from the marketer as the material is being covered.
  • A family could watch a movie where the actor can explain more info about how a scene was shot or the director can talk about the plot as the movie is happening, and answer questions that the viewer may have.

The idea would be to take the customized interaction you have in ChatGPT, and move them to the AR/VR world via a visual component such as a persona, similar to a hologram. The benefits of AI would be that the persona of an actor or performer or subject matter expert would be able to respond to the viewer individually, giving them a customized response, if not have an actual ‘conversation’ with them.

The possibilities are endless. think back to this scene from Minority Report:

Here, the ‘ads’ are basically holograms that have scanned the shoppers’ retina to identify who they are, and access their purchase history. Then they could offer customized ads based on what they had already bought. This is pretty limited, a seamless integration of AI with AR/VR could lead to the ads engaging with the shopper in a back and forth in order to provide a truly customized experience.

Long-term, I think AI will have a massive impact on AR and VR, both at the consumer and brand level. I do think the technology needs to mature a bit more before the true potential of this collaboration can be realized. But in another 5-10 years, the AI/AR/VR experience could be truly immersive and truly transformational.