Let’s get ready to rumble in customer service. Our boxing ring is the telecom industry. The challenger in the red corner: a modern contact center. In the blue corner we have the veteran, the call center. It has prepared itself for this fight through an upgrade in digital transformation. The question is: who wins? The condition for victory is to offer each customer generation the communication channel that suits them best. And the price is a leading position in the saturated telecommunications market.

Customer self-service is an important tool in customer service and a feature of the self-service culture in our society. Customers wish to troubleshoot pro-actively 24/7 across all communication channels. But what are the characteristics of successful customer self-service? And how can a company profit from this service channel? We point out the important factors.

“Customer service is undergoing changes due to disruptive technologies and digitalization.” CX managers, IT technicians and software architects from the support sector are often confronted with this statement – often followed by the instruction to make the company’s service fit for today’s technological and digital opportunities. But how do technologies improve existing customer service approaches? Where are the opportunities and challenges of the technologies and communication channels in service? And where are the limits of technological progress?

Many see the capability of chatbots to engage in dialog as their biggest potential in customer service applications. To this day, however, smooth communication with a machine via free text without loss of context is not possible. Nevertheless, bots already now provide added value for customers if their existing dialog skills are combined with technical processes carried out autonomously by the bots to solve customers’ issues. Telecommunication companies can benefit from this option to generate a positive customer experience outside of call center business hours.

Three days at Germany’s capital, third time an exhibitor and three major takeaways:  the 21st edition of CCW was held from February 19-21st at the Estrel Convention center in Berlin.  With 270 exhibitors and more than 8000 exhibitors from 46 countries CCW provided an international forum featuring latest technological trends and innovative services in customer dialogue.