If you believe that customer service is an art that only the customer care professionals are capable of doing and that technology should not play a role in your customer's experience, you are fundamentally missing the boat. Technology is an incredible force in customer service. Customer service teams should use it to its full potential and embrace it as a partner instead of a restriction for their business. This new philosophy will dramatically increase your customer satisfaction rate and improve your company's ability to keep its customers and keep the jobs of the customer service team intact.
How technology helps your customer service team to streamline and automate processes: Technology has become so ubiquitous that some companies actually have a human in the loop. Humans have been involved in all aspects of customer interaction, right from planning and designing the products and services that go into a business to actual interactions with customers and their representatives. However, automation has been playing a more important role. Today, many business processes are being automated so that human involvement is minimized. For example, if you have a customer care representative that takes calls on behalf of a company but is actually an automated machine, this person may not be happy about this fact.
How technology helps your customer service team: Technology has also been playing a bigger role in how customer service representatives interact with their customers. It used to be that if you wanted to talk to someone at the other end of the call, you had to lean over to the other side to get the attention of the person on the other end of the call. In the past, this meant that a person on the other end of the call wasn't always happy or appreciated. Now, many automated systems mean that a representative can simply press a button to get the customer's attention, or even speak repetitively to make a point. Automating the process may have started off as something that was considered slightly unethical, but today, it is often practiced by many customer service departments.