We are in the early stages of a broader transformation in how enterprise organizations look at the role of support. In the near future, support will become much more automated, but will also become much more customer-facing.
I traveled last week to Las Vegas to try to answer what may become a vital question for an entire sector of the technology industry: is there a future in providing technology support?
In the MGM Conference Center, over 2,300 service desk analysts and other technology support professionals gathered for HDI’s service and support conference. And as they did, this question — both spoken and unspoken — lingered just beneath the surface.
As conversations about chatbots, artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of automation swirled about the expo floor and mixed with talk about the shifting role of support, the question about the future of this space became both relevant and timely.
It’s a challenging time for the industry. One on hand, futuristic, AI-powered technologies are mesmerizing us with utopian promises of systems that can anticipate our every need. Fueled by this promise, it’s also a time in which we are becoming increasingly intolerant of antiquated, unintuitive systems and the script-reading call center agents that support them.
We are at once more capable than ever of supporting our own technology needs, and yet so dependent on that technology that any disruption borders on catastrophic.
It is within this atmosphere that the service and support industry is encountering dual, counter-balanced forces that will shape its future:
- Automation
- The customer experience
