Gartner: top five customer services technologies

In a recent report made by Gartner, the company highlighted the importance of investments in customer services technology in order for companies to deliver on their customer experience goals. 

“Organisations’ customer experience priorities have changed, not only from year to year, but also in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” commented Drew Kraus, vice president in Gartner’s Customer Service & Support practice. 

“As a result, this year’s Hype Cycle encourages service and support leaders to approach the broad range of service and support technologies as an integrated ecosystem of functionality, rather than as a set of separate, compartmentalised systems. In doing so, they can better analyse investments that will provide consistent, effortless, intelligent and holistic customer service experience.” 

The top five technologies highlighted in Gartner's Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2020

Customer engagement hubs (CEH)

Customer engagement hubs (CEH) enable proactive and reactive communication, as well as personalised and contextual customer engagement. CEHs enable this via an architectural framework that ties multiple systems together, using humans, artificial agents and sensors across the multiple interaction channels.

Customer service analytics

Customer service analytics combine interaction analytics, customer journeys and next best action analytics, to provide real time and historical insights.

Garnter reports that this technology has the potential to uncover a diverse range of insights which can be harnessed to improve the performance of advisors and the operation.

Voice of the customer (VoC) solutions

 Voice of the customer (VoC) solutions combine multiple siloed technology for direct and indirect customer feedback capture, storage and analysis. The technology can provide greater insights, improve accuracy and help companies to make confident decisions. 

The holistic approach of integrating data from multiple sources, provides an overall insight for companies to manage brand perceptions and understand customer experience.

Chatbots

Chatbots - technology that uses apps, messaging platforms, social networks or chat solutions for customer engagement. The technology can range in sophistication and has played an important role for many organisations responding to the impact of COVID-19.

Virtual customer assistants (VCAs)

Virtual customer assistants (VCAs), this technology acts on behalf of companies to engage, deliver information or act on behalf of customers. Garnter reports that by harnessing this technology companies can scale up their number of engagements that they can handle - especially in contact centres.

To read Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2020 report, click here!

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