Customer service can be frustrating for consumers, expensive for businesses, and time-consuming for both. But emerging technologies on the cusp of wide adoption—including augmented reality, the Internet of Things, and AI-powered virtual assistants—offer the potential to transform the customer experience while reducing cost.
Demonstrations at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco provide a glimpse of where things are heading. In one example, a Wi-Fi-enabled Yamaha dirt bike showed how augmented reality could reshape the way field service technicians and owners work on machines.
The motorbike essentially operates as an IoT device on wheels, uploading health and status information daily that is integrated into Oracle Service Cloud. A smartphone application from IoT specialist ThingWorx recognizes the bike and presents the user with a variety of information options superimposed on the bike’s real-life image. Users can drill down into a wealth of data about the bike—including sensor information such as oil pressure, as well as specifications, manuals, and service history.
Servicing the bike is facilitated by an augmented-reality experience that could replace the need to thumb through manuals, allowing users to view bike components from any angle and see how they fit together. “It visually disassembles the bike. The parts fly apart to provide an exploded view,” said Joshua Bowcott, Oracle product manager. “You can imagine how field service agents could use this.”
The rapid expansion of IoT means that a growing number of other devices are also able to upload information about their status to the cloud. The information can then be used for predictive maintenance and faster problem resolution.
“IoT is exploding,” Bowcott said. “The ability to extract data out of those devices and use it for predictive maintenance is a business changer.”
Preemptively Solving 3D Printing Problems
Carbon, a 3D printer maker, is making the collection of IoT data integral to the customer experience—and to its entire business. The company’s printers are used by a wide variety of businesses, including Adidas, which is partnering with Carbon to produce 3D-printed footwear made to customers’ exact specifications. Each printer includes approximately two dozen sensors that continually upload status information, allowing the company to remotely track usage and pre-emptively address problems.
This means that when Carbon works with customers to solve problems, the agent is already armed with the data needed to understand the customer’s specific problems. Because of this, the agent can quickly focus on solving the specific issues. “We can ask questions about the process the customer is going through, not questions to gather data,” said Maya Apolinario, Carbon’s support operations manager.
Carbon can also detect patterns in usage and proactively reach out to customers that may need help, Apolinario said. That’s very different from a traditional hardware company, which might not even know that a customer has stopped using its product and, if so, why.
Customer Communication Channels
Businesses face challenges not only integrating new data sources such as IoT, but enabling customers to communicate using an expanding set of channels and devices, including social media, mobile, web chat, phone, and web self-service.
“There are many options, and options can disrupt customer service,” said Stephen Fioretti, vice president of Outbound Product Management for Oracle Service Cloud. Furthermore, those channels are likely to continuously evolve—new ones appearing, others fading—and customer interactions may shift among them, making it essential to capture the context of each interaction. “Our vision is to create the platform to enable organizations to deploy any combination of channels dynamically, regardless of what channel combinations may occur in the future,” Fioretti said.
AI-powered virtual assistants will play roles in many of the interactions conducted over these channels, and as AI and machine learning are applied to analyze customer data, will increasingly be able to automate the process of answering customer questions. Even a basic level of machine assistance—in which a virtual assistant gathers preliminary information about a customer’s product during a chat session, before escalating to a live agent—can reduce service costs and waiting time.
Mike Faden is a principal at Content Marketing Partners.
