How to engage customers--and keep them engaged--is a focal question for organizations across the business-to-consumer (B2C) landscape, where disintermediation by digital platforms continues to erode traditional business models. Engaged customers are more loyal, have more touchpoints with their chosen brands, and deliver greater value over their lifetime. Yet financial institutions have often struggled to secure the deep consumer engagement typical in other mobile app–intermediated services. The average visit to a bank app lasts only half as long as a visit to an online shopping app, and only one-quarter as long as a visit to a gaming app. Hence, customer service offers one of the few opportunities available to transform financial-services interactions into memorable and long-lasting engagements.

Companies are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) technology in a variety of settings, but one part of the business--the contact center--is receiving extra AI investment. The contact center AI market is projected to reach a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent by 2024. Businesses are implementing new technology to help relieve various pressures on their contact centers. They need to scale to sustain increasing inbound communications, and to maintain consistent messaging and quality across communication channels. They need to support a shift from on-premise to remote work.

Helpdesk solutions aim to support employees to deliver excellent customer service. AI customer service can help a business to achieve high productivity and meet customer expectations. Being'Instant' is the way to'Wow' your customers. For instance, the automated response sent to the customer as soon as the request is received. The customer will get acknowledgment, complete information about estimated time to solve the problem and possible alternatives.

Cast your mind back to April, and the image of a United passenger being ejected from an overbooked plane, wrestled to the ground by security guards and then forcibly dragged, kicking and screaming, from the flight he was about to take home. Such an unsavoury incident was deeply damaging for the United brand, but it also cast a shadow over the customer service profession as a whole. How could an established business like United misread a situation so badly? Had the humanity of customer service become so far-removed that rigid procedure replaced common sense? In many ways, 2017 has been a year defined by the customer service profession questioning its own humanity. The proliferation of chatbots, artificial intelligence and voice assistants has increasingly raised the question of where humans fit into the service function in their business.

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of addressing a large audience at a conference, presenting to a group of mixed professionals (including C-suite, Manager, Mid-level and executives, across a broad range of industry including IT, services govt, utilities, education, non-profit, hospital, health care, Financial services, insurance, automotive, Pharmaceuticals, aviation, aerospace, medical devices). The topic was, embracing and humanizing customer self-service channels; creating a personalized user experience in self-service channels. I have provided an overview of the presentation here for your convenience. At the conference I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Rohit Mandana and we had a very interesting discussion about life outside of our professional engagements and then as these things do, our passion for our professions jumped back in and we were back and hot on the trail of bots, chatbots, AI and the role that they are playing in reshaping life as we know it. Sure there's all the latest stuff like Google Home and Uber Driverless (although now suspended I believe this tech will proceed) but we're beyond that now.

Keith Pearce is VP of Marketing for Service Cloud at Salesforce. An industry veteran who got his start close to 20 years ago at Siemens, he's a firm believer in the transformative value of great customer service -- both to companies and to their customers. Recently, we caught up with Keith to get his thoughts on the future of service, and what that means for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Keith Pearce: I've always loved the industry and the space. Humans have an innate desire to help people, and at the end of the day that's what service is about and why I like it so much.