Customer Service Executives Need To Build A New Strategy For 2025
The blog post highlights the shift from traditional contact centers to AI-driven customer service strategies, emphasizing the efficiency of chatbots in handling simple inquiries and allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues. Companies are urged to adapt by integrating AI and rethinking their support roles to create a more flexible, skilled, and respected customer service environment.
The way that companies build a customer service strategy is now changing faster than ever before. The traditional approach of building a large contact center filled with thousands of agents all working 8-hour shifts is now extremely dated. Change is not just coming - it’s already here.
These enormous contact centers never worked really well. They always struggled during peak periods or had too many people without enough calls to keep them busy. They were just not very flexible. If an agent has to commute to a contact center then they cannot focus on the busy periods of the day by working a split shift.
The traditional approach to managing customer service is inefficient and does not really deliver a great experience to the agents or customers.
The pandemic forced many companies to explore how to deliver customer service with people working from home, but there is much more to design-ing flexibility than just the location where people are working.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also handling more complex customer questions. Chatbots can now be trained on product or service details so most simple questions will always be handled by the AI bot - a self-service process where the customer is happy because they quickly get the information they need.
The financial service company Klarna is demonstrating that the bot they initially installed to answer customer questions can also be seen as a customer assistant. It can compare prices, find deals, and recommend products. It can actively support the customer and help them to buy the best product at the best price. Customer service becomes revenue-generating.
When Klarna first installed their AI-powered chatbot earlier in 2024 it immediately started answering around two-thirds of all customer questions. This demonstrates that chatbots can be very useful if they are designed well and trained on the right product information.
But even in this case, around a third of customers needed to talk to an agent to resolve their problem.
This example reinforces the idea that traditional approaches to customer service are dated. A modern customer service strategy will involve an initial interaction with AI - to screen out all the simple customer questions. It will then be supported by highly trained and talented human support.
A customer service executive designing their strategy for 2025 needs to ask the question - why am I still paying for a contact center rather than designing a service process that uses AI and a flexible platform-based support team?
Klarna is an extreme example. Most companies are not immediately eliminating two-thirds of all their customer interactions with AI, but even if you can tackle 30-40% quickly then that is a large amount of volume that your human agents don’t need to handle.
The profile of your support agents needs to change to reflect that most of the simple questions will no longer get to them. If a customer first searches for help on Google, then uses the AI chatbot, and then calls because they still can’t find an answer then they expect to talk to the A-team. Your customer support people need to be better than Google and AI combined.
They need to be smart, knowledgeable, and focused on problem-solving. They need to be trouble-shooters.
This doesn’t sound like a traditional contact center does it? People under pressure to handle more calls, often earning minimum wage, and leaving as soon as they find a better job. Most contact centers need to replace half of the entire workforce each year - some even more.
Every executive managing a customer service process can see that the world is changing. As AI gets better and answers more customer questions there is less need for an enormous contact center. You need fewer people working in customer service, but they need to be more respected, rewarded better, and treated like the third-line support that they really are.
The Yoummday platform naturally allows any company to explore their own AI triage strategy with our platform supporting all the customer interactions that need a real person. A person who is working from home, choosing their own work hours, and working on a project they enjoy and where they have expertise. See the difference?
If you are still struggling to understand why your time is spent fighting staff turnover and attrition rather than planning for the future then get in touch with our team.
