Good customer service is increasingly crucial, as customer satisfaction significantly impacts business success. Many service professionals are aware that, before addressing customer issues, they must first resolve their own internal challenges.

These challenges include:

  • High time pressure
  • Limited resources
  • Skill shortages
  • Communication barriers
  • Poor data foundation
  • Fragmented tools and solutions
  • Competitive and innovation pressures
  • Missing or inconsistent goals

Despite these obstacles, customer service remains a vital revenue driver for companies. So, how can you strengthen your customer service and prepare it for the future? First of all, you should get to know the potential of the following five tech solutions, as they offer real relief and are therefore becoming increasingly popular.

Trend 1: Intelligent Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Integrating a service tool into a powerful CRM system offers significant advantages for service teams. This integration facilitates management, viewing, organizing, and analysis of current customer data. Additionally, linking service tools with CRM systems optimizes operations, enabling faster response times to customer inquiries and tickets as well as automated processes, such as auto-assigning specific tickets to specific team members.

Trend 2: Digital Field Service Management (FSM)

Assigning the right service team with the necessary skills and materials to the right location at the right time is a core task in customer service. This can be challenging, especially when coordinating external technicians and remote team members. A transparent, continuous, and immediate flow of information — including mobile access — is essential for ensuring customer satisfaction. Digital FSM solutions like SAP FSM are therefore increasingly popular. These tools support all stages of a field assignment and streamline remote work: they incorporate various communication and input channels, such as phone calls, QR code scans, and emails, even offering AI-generated response options. Additionally, they enable efficient service scheduling.

Trend 3: AI in Customer Service

AI is gaining an increasingly prominent role in customer service, making processes more efficient and workflows smoother. Some of the key emerging AI applications include chatbots, guided service, text and behavior analysis, automated translations, and proactive notifications.

Trend 4: Automated Aftermarket Service and Self-Service Customer Portals

Upgrade and spare parts sales, recycling, and maintenance services offer substantial revenue potential through cross-selling and up-selling of aftermarket services. Seamless integration between sales and service is therefore essential. Solutions like SAP Commerce Cloud are increasingly used for bringing together all relevant participants (customers, field teams, service teams, partners, dealers, and branches), providing a central overview, and addressing all backend, CMS, and CRM functions.

Trend 5: Knowledge Management

With remote first practices, knowledge for both internal and external use must be organized for instant access. This includes technical, organizational, and product knowledge. Continually enhancing and structuring information in a dynamic knowledge base enables faster problem-solving, greater customer satisfaction, and, ideally, allows customers to self-serve — ultimately reducing the number of support requests.

Conclusion: No One Solution Solves All Challenges — But There Are At Least Five Major Aids

While a single "miracle solution" that resolves all customer service challenges may still be out of reach, it is worthwhile to adopt software solutions that address core service needs. Digitized processes enable faster, data-driven work and can completely replace cumbersome, error-prone manual processes. The five customer service tech trends described above are not isolated solutions but rather interdependent.

To explore which software solutions might benefit you or your team, attend the Sybit Expert Forum Service Excellence at the end of September 2023. Here, today’s digital service topics will be expertly discussed and evaluated:  https://www.sybit.de/events/ef-service-excellence-2023