Earlier this month, we continued our three waves of customer support series with the second wave: workflows. We explored how this wave of automation is tackling processes with greater complexity, and talked about how companies have benefited from this scaled approach of servicing customers.
But the question is: for how long? It's no longer impressive for an entire customer journey to be automated from initial research, to purchase, to receipt of a product, to post-purchase support.
It needs to work.
Yext research shows that up to 50% of consumers still call live customer support teams as their first action when seeking support, well over using a chatbot, navigating a company's site, or using search in any form. And yet, this is at odds with the fact that 85% of consumers say that it's important to them to be able to resolve issues without contacting the company. These automated workflows and tasks — while serving as critical steps in the evolution of customer support — still have a gap to close with respect to customer behavior and expectation. There are still nuances that automated workflows aren't fully understanding.
Enter the third wave of customer support: AI search and natural language.