Customer Service in 2025
Intro
Throughout 2019, I’ve shared my thoughts on more than a few topics around the future of customer service — everything from why E-mail, Phone, and Helpcenters will all fall out of favour (they are all inferior interfaces — slower, less mobile-friendly, and/or asynchronous — compared to text chat) to The Human Adaptability Problem (the idea that technological advancement is outpacing our ability to learn).
Now that we are wrapping up the decade, I wanted to give a synthesis of these thoughts, digesting them to identify megatrends and to paint a vivid picture of what customer service in 2025 could (or at the very least should!) look like.
Underlying megatrends & their implications
The course of the future is shaped by so-called “megatrends” — underlying market forces, technological advancement, and changes in user behaviour. These are the top megatrends that I see as being most relevant for shaping customer service:
The instant economy leads to more impatient customers
We live in an instant economy. Services ranging from music (Spotify) to video (Netflix) to groceries (Amazon Prime Now) are in an ever-increasing race to be the fastest, most convenient, most at-your-fingertips solution. Asynchronous relics such as E-mail are being abandoned
This implies that customer service, now more than ever, is an unwanted pitstop; it is an obstacle between getting the service “now” versus “later.” So, in an ideal world, the best customer service is a product that “just works.”
Failing that, customer service needs to be as short a pit stop as possible. In a world where we get annoyed if Netflix buffers for two seconds, customers’ tolerance for frustrations and delays will continue to diminish. I recently spoke to the Head of Customer Service of a major insurance firm; they were struggling to answer emails within the same working day, and were noticing that customers frequently sent a second or third message if they didn’t get that same-day reply… further exacerbating the backlog on the insurance company’s side!
Real-time answers will be demanded. Any companies failing to keep up will soon find their customers abandoning them in favour of their faster competitors.
2. “Mobile first” as a centerpiece of service strategy
Smartphones have won the technology game. In 2019, the number of mobile devices surpassed the number of desktops in the world. In the two countries with the largest populations, this trend is old news: China’s mobile share surpassed desktop in 2016, and in India, where mobile currently accounts for 80% of the desktop-mobile-tablet market share, mobile first gained majority share way back in 2012. In the places they haven’t yet become the central piece of technology in our lives, smartphones will rapidly become the place we go for virtually everything.
This trend is far more significant than simply indicating people have a different device they use to access services; mobile is a fundamentally different medium, with less screen real-estate and higher UI expectations than its cluttered desktop counterparts.
Given the mobile device will be so central, customer service also needs to be built, ground-up, to be “mobile first.” Gone are the days of clumsily exporting a desktop website to a mobile layout; the entire service experience needs to be built with smartphones in mind.
3. New channels will drive higher contact volumes
Customers are being presented with more and more ways to engage with their favourite brands. Channels that were unheard of a decade ago are now fundamental pillars of our communication. WhatsApp is a prime example — founded in 2009, there are now only 25 countries in the world where WhatsApp is not the market leader, according to a report by Messenger People. In Germany, 58 million people — 70% of the population — use WhatsApp daily as of Q3 2019. What’s more, there are clear indications that they will end their beta program and open their APIs to everyone in the next 2–3 years. This will allow companies to create their own business accounts — like they already do on Google or Facebook.
WhatsApp isn’t alone in offering customers ways to chat with brands: Apple’s Business Chat integrates “click to chat” into Safari search results (a single click will open a text to the company) and Google My Business is pushing in the same direction.
The barrier to contact a company is lowering. Instead of having to wait for a quiet time within business hours to call a company, customers can open a chat anytime, anywhere. I predict the number of service requests to increase by at least 5x in the coming years. Which is a good thing for customer engagement — but a bad thing for customer service teams if they are not prepared for the swell.
An effective omnichannel CRM system and a way to automate answering repetitive requests (like a well-set-up chatbot) will be mandatory to deal with this new volume. And such strategies will only increase in importance over time.
4. Voice-based tech will be important… but not for customer service
The potential of voice-based tech in customer service is totally overrated in my eyes; I would put it at the peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle. Note that I’m not talking about speech recognition here, but “voice bots” that try to work like chatbots, but purely using voice.
In my opinion, such “voice bots” are inferior versions of their text-based counterparts. You cannot give visual cues, share links, or scroll through dense information using voice. Voice simply is not the best interface for customer service.
So, although I expect that command-based interfaces will continue to wow us and that personal assistants will add more and more capabilities to their arsenal, I just don’t see voice moving customer service away from instant messaging.
5. Advancements in Machine Learning will improve automation
Today, Machine Learning is still very much in its infancy. It’s not difficult to predict that AI Readiness will eventually be table stakes for all companies, but this is a process that will take time. After all, we’ve had primitive digital signatures around since the 1980s, but some companies still use the less secure paper and pen option to sign-off on important documents.
Similarly, we can definitely expect that rule-based software development will be replaced by algorithmic software in the future — programs that learn “on their own” and need fewer and fewer explicit rules to function. But let’s be realistic — there is no singularity coming in the next few years.
Nevertheless, software will get smarter, algorithms will improve, and usage will increase — and through this, we will collect more data, which will in turn lead to better predictions. Machine Learning cycles will shorten. It’s important for every company to keep up with the times.
6. More “out of the box” SaaS and APIs will lead to even less reliance on IT
Today, many B2B SaaS solutions are already relatively hassle-free to set up. Sophisticated chatbots, for example, can easily be created without IT. On the other hand, they still currently rely on the IT department to give the enduser a personalised experience (i.e. to fetch user data as they interact with the bot).
So, not only will SaaS solutions become even more seamlessly self-service, but open APIs will make connections between different systems easier. There is a marked movement towards openness and inter-connectivity; from CRM systems opening their APIs to the rise of “aggregators” such as tray.io. I see the progression of this trend as being inevitable.
Moving forward, out-of-the-box solutions will be the norm, and every business stakeholder will be expected to own the launch and setup of the tools relevant for their domain — no IT needed.
What will not change
Though these megatrends show how much will change, there are also several key points that will stay the same:
“Customer centricity” will remain the single most important aspect of superior customer service
Service will continue to require a personal, empathetic touch
Involving real people (not chatbots) on complex or delicate cases will remain crucial
Painting a vivid 2025
Contacting companies will be frictionless. Customers can take out their phone or scroll through their wearables and use the messaging service of their choice. They can search for the company name (possibly using voice), and immediately open a conversation with the brand.
A much larger number of contacts will be made per customer as the barrier to contact a company is so low. Customer service teams will not be able to handle this volume on their own, so automation will be present at every step. No company messenger account will be handled by a human — the conversation will always be started by a bot. In the background, the bot will be fed with user data to personalise the experience.
If the problem turns out to be too complex or too delicate for the bot to navigate, a customer service agent will seamlessly take over the conversation. While bots will be omnipresent, human heuristics will continue to be relevant.
It will become standard for over 80% of user requests to be handled by a bot — completely bypassing the need for human assistance. Users will accept this, understanding that bots are faster and more accurate than humans for the vast majority of cases.
Competition will increase and customer service will be at the heart of company strategy. Customers will take it as a given that a company’s product must work perfectly. Whenever it doesn’t, each customer service contact becomes a chance to pleasantly surprise the customer.