Brands, retailers & online shopping businesses put Christmas to bed in terms of product and promotion before they disappear off on their Summer holidays. Despite the repetitive chaos of bygone years, customer support still appears to be an afterthought. 

The service spikes created by Black Friday, fulfilment gone wrong, out of stocks and the inevitable returns coinciding with January sales, invariably create poor CX at a time of year when ‘getting it wrong’ can be disastrous for a brand.

2022 is the first year when conversational support & AI can circumvent these issues. However, it is unlikely that many will be able to reach out to customers with proactive messaging that is contextual, timely & personalised. For example, displaying delays on product delivery, information on product announcements etc.

Yet all of this is possible if you recognise the following priorities…

• Be everywhere: let your customer interact in any channel
• Be proactive: be able to start the conversation and preempt an issue
• Be personalised: know your customer & keep it personal 
• Be effortless: integrate with back-office to make it zero-touch 
• Be self-improving: insights and learning, if you want to get better

Delivering against these priorities is a bigger challenge requiring…

• The right foundation: a platform to support interactions with customers, agents & back-end systems
• A unified workspace:  a single technology platform with multiple customer channels
• An amenable set of APIs: to personalise & optimise interactions by accessing CRM, business apps & employee workflows
• Automated, asynchronous interactions: to deliver zero touch and/or identifying & routing tickets to agents
• Continuous improvement: through machine learning, reporting & anecdotal feedback 

Empowering customers to self-serve when able or connecting to humans when either additional support is required or an inquiry needs to be elsewhere, may seem to the sceptical like some form of Utopia. However, it's already arrived.

But you’ll only achieve this with the right technology platform, associated supporting technologies & the support of industry experts with the experience to be able to design, deploy, improve and scale on your behalf.

Serving customers in a quick, efficient and personalised way and at the same time making them happy should be the goal of every organisation in 2023.