Will COVID change customer services? I’m old enough to remember the days when there were buildings that housed enormous ‘Customer Contact Centers’. machine in the future of customer experience. Millard, BT Global Service Innovation Team Botman vs. In the meanwhile, here’s a screen shot from the document which I’m sure / imagine / hope, is at the core of how every customer service function works (with or without computers).ĭigital or not, these points are relevant. That might be for the excellent descriptions of machine learning and artificial intelligence. That’s all I want to say about that for the moment, I suspect I will come back to ‘Botman v Superagent’ in the future. The people who do this job have serious skills and generally work best as part of a wider Team or Network.The machines deal with the ‘simple’ FAQ’s while the humans deal with the complex and emotive issues and.This works best where computers complement and support what humans do.computers (machine learning and artificial intelligence) have an important role to play in the delivery of customer service.Here are some key points from the white paper where I think we should pay attention: I think the white paper is essential reading for anyone involved in customer services – especially if it involves the phone, video or anything digital (including pesky chatbots). I’ve heard the author Nicola Millard, BT Head of Customer Insight & Futures, speak a few times. The BT Global Service Innovation Team white paper Botman vs. However, if you want to get a sense of what good customer services could look like, have a look at this. This seems to be just as relevant 6 years on and ‘shoving’ is common practice across both public and private sectors. One of the things that sticks in my head is a 2014 blog post written by Kate Bentham called Channel shift or Channel shove? The point made by Kate is that many services seem to have been designed to ‘shove’ people into things that work for the organisation (rather than the customer). There are serious people who have a deep understanding of this topic.

I realise that this amounts to far more than my delight at talking to someone who sounds like me and knows the local geography. What makes a good customer service person.

Can the skills and networks developed during COVID be used for other things?.What working arrangements will exist after COVID and.What actually makes a good ‘customer service’ person.The questions floating around my head include The warm glow of human contact with someone who sounded like me and sounded they cared.īut why does this matter? Well, the experiences have got me thinking about how ‘customer service’ might work after COVID. Aye, exactly! I’ve not much confidence that the problem will actually get sorted (it’s complicated), but I did feel a bit joyful after the experience. “Oh, I know, its down by there… them lot with the orange writing on their trucks”. They sounded like me, and had a fair idea of exactly what I was talking about. The person I eventually spoke to (they too have that horrendous rigmarole of pushing buttons up front) was a delight. The other experience was a reporting a problem. I’m fairly confident that it’s actually designed to be almost impossible (*meant to say subscription, but the typo works better). It’s just a lengthy exchange of messages where you have to answer infuriating questions, repeatedly, to the point where you almost give up. You don’t actually get to speak to anyone human. The terrible grind is what you might expect when trying to cancel a conscription* with a massive global company. One was a terrible grind, the other left me feeling joyful.

It’s Down By There… I had two experiences of Customer Services this week.

Paul botman musition