'Human intermediaries' role in customer services to come down'

With ever increasing introductions of latest automative methods and interfaces into customer service interactions, the dependency on human intermediaries by corporates will come down after 2017, says a Gartner report.
Automation and intelligence agents are reducing the percentage of customer support interactions that require a human to solve, according to Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company.
However, the pace of introduction channel choice such as sensors, virtual customer assistants, kiosks and in-line video chat and the focus on personalised customer experiences will require companies in most industries to retain highly-trained core of customer service professionals.
The report says that one-third of all customer service interactions will still require the support of a human intermediary until 2017, but this will be cut nearly to half over the next 24 months through more radical services, communities, alerts and mobile devices.

It added that weak mobile customer service is harming customer engagement.
"Businesses need to focus on what key customer experiences would benefit from customer engagement with a human," says Michael Maoz, vice president and analyst at Gartner.

By 2018, 5 per cent of customer service cases will be initiated by Internet-connected devices, up from 0.02 per cent in 2014, it said.
As per the study, the installed base of "things," excluding PCs, tablets and smartphones, will grow to 26 billion units in 2020.
By this time, a home could have more than 500 smart objects collaborating in a personal Internet of Things (IoT).

The added connectivity, communications and intelligence of things make many of them agents for services that are currently requested and delivered through people, it said.
"The explosive growth of the IoT and associated use cases will bring a transformational change in the customer service space," said Olive Huang, research director at Gartner.
Industries like manufacturing, healthcare providers, insurance, banking and securities, retail and wholesale, computing services, government, transportation, utilities, real estate and business services, agriculture and communications will be the front runners in this trend, he added.
Further in 2015, Gartner estimates that more than 50 of the 500 largest global businesses will introduce video-based chat by 2018, for customer-facing interactions.