Field service organizations have traditionally operated under the break-fix model--that is, responding to a device failure after the customer reports an issue. This operating model has grown antiquated due to rising costs and inefficiencies in labor and operations. It is also proving less than effective in satisfying the customer's growing expectations. The field service industry is evolving quickly in new and exciting directions with cutting-edge technology continuing to enter the arena. These innovations in technology and workflows are helping to transform field service by providing customers optimal device uptime, along with greater visibility, efficiency, and profitability.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. The revenue and margin leaks that services businesses never see coming tend to hit their financials the hardest. When there are gaps in customer success coverage combined with little visibility and control of services revenue, leaks can grow. Turbulent economic conditions make the leaks grow faster, giving customers a reason to question if they're getting the value they expect. Sure signs a customer success organization is experiencing revenue leaks include not knowing the costs of upsells, cross-sells, not having a financially based view of every customer engagement, growing churn rates and more.

Sam Waicberg is the President of CareAR Holdings, a Xerox and ServiceNow-supported company. If someone says "AI," what do you think? Most people would say, "artificial intelligence." McKinsey notes that AI adoption is rising steadily, citing that 56% of all respondents to their 2021 survey report AI adoption in at least one function, up from 50% in 2020. Service organizations are one of the primary areas where AI is being applied. While machine learning delivers new insight, it cannot entirely replace humans.

Today's hottest customer service technologies focus mostly on providing assisted service and freeing up support reps' time -- reflecting the increasing shift to digital self-service platforms and analytics capabilities. These technologies reflect emerging technology trends designed to support a company's ability to better understand and anticipate customer needs. An increase in ROI and deployment of these technologies indicate that leaders are looking toward a better experience for the digital customer. "While the rep remains a valuable focus of technology investment trends, customer service leaders are signaling an increased focus on the value of analytics and self-service technologies that help understand and serve the digital customer," says Connor Seidenschwarz, Principal, Research at Gartner. Based on a Gartner survey of customer service and support (CSS) leaders across the globe, here are four key trends to watch in customer service technology.

Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) have traditionally been viewed as separate and somewhat unequal worlds--RPA proponents consider AI to be impractical, while AI enthusiasts deem RPA primitive--but these two fields are highly complementary. Think of them as the brawn and the brains of performance. Companies can gain quick wins through RPA while strategically introducing AI for sustainable benefits and continual optimization. Services are especially amenable to this approach. By services, we mean both service industries, such as banking, insurance, and telecommunications, as well as services provided by in-house support functions, such as finance, HR, and IT.

You probably guessed "customers" or "clients" right? This is because you thought from a business perspective and you are absolutely correct! When it comes to getting questions answered or problems solved, there is one thing that almost all customers have in common – they do not like to wait. According to research carried out by HubSpot, 90% of customers rate "immediate" response as a must when they have a customer service question. Furthermore, 60% of customers define "immediate" as 10 minutes or less.

Customer service organizations need AI and automation solutions to deliver efficiencies while also ensuring they understand the customer's voice. A new state-of-speech-analytics report, published by Opus Research and Uniphore, reveals enterprise interest in more transformational business applications, which go beyond typical speech analytics. The four-year tracking survey, which covered 400 decision-makers in customer experience and contact management centers, identified Conversational Survey Automation (CSA) as an emerging and highly valued category of solution for enterprises. CSA leverages artificial intelligence to improve resolution rates while reducing handle time for customer queries, according to Uniphore. It is built into a real-time analytics platform, which already provides actionable insights for human agents.

If you're anything like me (or millions of other everyday consumers), you may be surprised to contact customer service only to be prompted with a litany of questions about who you are and what you're issue is. If I dial a service line, I've been conditioned to expect a friendly voice -- real or not -- that recognizes my phone number and asks if I'm calling about a recent transaction. What's more, I expect a similar experience if I connect over a myriad other digital touchpoints. Such is the level of sophistication we as customers now hold as standard, and the impacts on customer service are nothing short of transformational. A solid majority of consumers and business buyers (62 percent) now expect companies to anticipate their needs.

How much has the pace of financial services industry innovation accelerated? The last 10 years have upped the stakes to improve client experiences like no other time in history--ushering in enormous omnichannel technology investment. During this time, we also saw robotic process automation emerge, with its power to improve efficiency by managing data entry between legacy systems. Yet the pace of change and scale of innovation over the past decade will pale compared to what lies ahead. Jim Marous, owner of the Digital Banking Report, said on a recent BAI Banking Strategies podcast, "The pace of change will never be this slow again"--a statement you can time not with a calendar, but with a stopwatch. And that will force the industry to adapt at an even more rapid pace in 2019: a critical year as financial services organizations lay the foundation for and embark upon truly transformational change.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become a KPI at many organizations, and for good reason. It is simple to measure and has the distinctive ability to indicate how the business will perform on several other metrics, including customer retention and revenue. While NPS is easy to measure, it is difficult to improve. Organizations understand that detractors have low NPS because they have had an unsatisfactory experience at some point in their customer journey. However, identifying where or when the unsatisfactory experience occurred is a challenge.