How are service personnel adopting AI, data science and customer engagement technologies to meet customer demands? Here is one vantage point…
In a Dec 2023/Jan 2024 double-anonymous survey of around 5,500 professionals* from 30 countries and 18 industries, in customer service roles including service operations, service agents, mobile workers, service managers/directors, and service leadership/head of service, some data trends around the global customer service industry have been disclosed.
For six markets in the Asia Pacific region — Australia/New Zealand, Indonesia, India, Japan, the Philippines and Singapore — several trends were observed.
The trends are tabulated below:
| Trend | Australia/NZ | Indonesia | India | Japan | The Philippines | Singapore |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expectations of customer service to contribute more to revenue in the next year | 79% | 74% | 79% | 73% | 89% | 80% |
| Expectations of more budget to scale up service quality as a revenue driver instead of being considered a cost center | 69% | 80% | 85% | 68% | 82% | 77% |
| Currently using or evaluating AI to boost service efficiency | 68% | 86% | 73% | 83% | 77% | 90% |
| Planning to increase AI investments in the year | 86% | 80% | 93% | 83% | 92% | 90% |
| Expectations of higher case volume in the year | 69% | 74% | 77% | 71% | 70% | 65% |
| Customers’ level of expectations being deemed higher than before | 81% | 91% | 88% | 92% | 83% | 81% |
| Improving data capabilities to support AI and data-driven technologies: | 86% | 97% | 92% | 85% | 85% | 72% |
| Plans to increase investments in data integration in the year ahead | 79% | 81% | 81% | 80% | 83% | 87% |
| Top three service-quality use cases | Automating summaries and reports, customer-facing bots, generating service responses | Generating service responses, customer-facing bots, automating summaries and reports | Automated summaries and reports, intelligent offers and recommendations, knowledge article creation | Automated summaries and reports, customer-facing intelligent assistants, and agent-facing intelligent assistants | Generating service responses, customer-facing bots, agent-facing bots | Automated summaries and reports, customer-facing bots, and generating service responses |
According to Gavin Barfield, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Solutions, Salesforce (ASEAN), which commissioned and conducted the survey: “Service teams cannot afford to miss the moments in the overall customer journey to build stronger relationships and loyalty… provide a smoother and more personalized customer service experience… (and) demonstrate their ability to drive revenue growth through greater efficiency and upsell activities. This will fundamentally shift the role of service teams within businesses from cost centers to profit centers.”
*all being panelists of third party databases, in firms ranging from small- and medium- sizes (30%) to mid-market sizes (50%) and enterprises hiring over 3,500 staff (20%)
