Customer service executives are alive to tech opportunities rating AI, personalisation and omnichannel capabilities as key to transformation in the future.

Across Incite Group’s new 2020 State of Customer Service Report, which is free to download now, there is a clear theme of customer service executives leaning into the possibilities of new technology. Principal among these are Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies that can help to automate simple tasks and drive a more personalised experience.

More than 900 respondents to the report’s survey gave their opinions about emerging tech. They said that they believe personalisation technologies will have the most potential in 2020 to drive improvements in customer service, with 46.8% choosing it as a key technology. This was followed by AI, which 44.3% feel is a major technological opportunity.

Direct communication tools were considered to offer major opportunities as well, with 43.1% seeing real-time messaging tools as offering big possibilities and 40.3% also seeing potential in chatbots and virtual assistants.

Furthermore, when asked what they thought the most talked-about topic would be in 2020, customer service execs chose the automation of simple tasks by AI, followed by a data driven customer experience and the transition of new digital channels and messaging services to the core of customer service.

While all these technologies offer opportunities in themselves, their true power will lie in combining them for maximum effectiveness. Chatbots, voice applications and virtual assistants will all be exponentially more powerful with personalisation driven by underlying analytics and AI. That same underlying structure can also help empower agents to be more effective at reaching solutions more quickly and accurately no matter what medium they are using through dashboards that can locate customer history or diagnose ongoing issues immediately and present them to the agent.

The ultimate goal of this is to drive a personalised, seamless omnichannel experience for the consumer. In the longer term, respondents to the report’s survey rate the development of a seamless omnichannel experience as the most transformative application of innovation in the next decade. Some 34% chose this as their trend to watch, followed by tools that can empower customer self-service (29.7%), improvements to automated responses (20.1%) and faster response times (16.2%).

This means that customer service departments will need to make major investments into data gathering and standardisation and the development and deployment of AI.

For more insight, click here to download the full report, which features key trends across more than 30 detailed charts and graphs taken from one of the biggest industry surveys out there across more than 40 pages of analysis. This report features hundreds of insights into how customer service is changing and innovating, including takes on artificial intelligence, automation, data management, measurement, personalisation, omnichannel and optimising organisation structures. Download the report now to get the data as well as views from top customer-service minds representing huge brands, including:

· Mastercard

· Microsoft

· Zurich

· Uber

· Plusnet