The Internet of Thing's Customer Service Challenges and Big Data impact

By Barton Goldenberg

1. What are the Internet of Thing’s resulting customer service challenges?

The resulting customer service challenges include:

• New Contact Center support requirements: I foresee the Contact Centers of the future offering support across most if not all channels – including telephone, Web, SMS messaging, Social Media, Internet of Things – that feed into one dashboard that is located on the Contact Center rep’s PC or alternate device.
• Potential need for enhanced customer service: Customers will have more questions/problems concerning Internet of Everything/Internet of Things, and this will require enhanced customer service.
• Role of mobility in customer service: As mobile devices interact more with Internet of Things devices/sensors, consumers will use more of their mobile devices to access customer service functions.

As the Internet of Everything/Internet of Things market grows, information flowing to/from sensors and devices will also grow as will customer service requests that may begin to overburden existing Contact Center capabilities.  This is why I foresee organizations increasingly creating well thought-out algorithms to receive Internet of Everything/Internet of Things customer service requests and redirecting these requests to the right resources – likely to include more self-service functionality and tutorials – for an appropriate response.

2. What is the Internet of Thing’s impact on Big Data analysis & insight?

Business and IT personnel will need to collaborate on Big Data issues.  This holds equally true for data coming in from the Internet of Things sensors and devices: the organization’s “creative” marketers need to determine how to best leverage the real-time data coming from the Internet of Things sensors and devices while the “technical” marketers need to harness real-time data coming from the Internet of Things sensors and devices to deliver smarter decision making. Together they need to answer the question: “Based on the data we are receiving from the Internet of Things sensors and devices, what products or services should we be offering to whom, when?”

For most organizations, this implies a likely need to enhance the data analytic capacity required to assimilate the billions of sensors providing data and billions of devices connected to one another.  It may also imply a need to secure additional data analytics skills either internally or via external subject matter expertise.

In our next blog post, we will discuss how to address new people, process, technology issues resulting from the Internet of Things phenomena.

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  Barton Goldenberg, is the founder and president of ISM Inc., customer-centric strategists/implementers serving best-in-class organizations globally. As a CRM leader for 30 years, he was among the first three inductees in the CRM Hall of Fame. Recognized as a leading “customer-focused” author, his latest book, The Definitive Guide to Social CRM, is hailed as the roadmap for Social CRM success. Barton is a popular speaker on “maximizing customer relationships to gain market insights, customers and profits”. He is a long-term columnist for CRM Magazine and speaker for CRMevolution and frequently quoted in the media.