Abinash Tripathy has worked in the tech space for over 25 years, with a strong focus on building products in communication technology. Early in his career, Abinash worked with some of the first and largest email companies during the medium’s earlier days. Over time, he turned his focus to the next set of communication technologies that would eventually become a part of our daily lives. Pinpointing messaging as the next big thing, Abinash founded Helpshift in 2012 with the vision of bringing this medium to businesses and enabling them to interact with consumers in the same way that consumers interact with their friends and family. Here, we speak to Abinash about the evolution of consumer expectations, the death of omnichannel and how businesses can prepare for the future of customer contact.

Today’s consumers are accustomed to an unprecedented speed and ease of service. This has led to a massive disconnect between consumer expectations and customer service delivery. When all you have to do to get naan and curry delivered in 30 minutes is press a button, why should you have to wait for an hour on the phone just to speak with an agent? How can brands translate one-click checkout into a new model for customer service?

Abinash Tripathy was asking himself this very question as early as 2012, when he founded Helpshift. Messaging was becoming more and more pervasive in the enterprise through tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and HipChat. These tools enabled new levels of scale and real-time communication to supplement traditional mediums like phone, video conference, and email. And yet, as organisations scaled and consumers began to increasingly rely on messaging in their personal and professional lives, customer service seemed stuck in the late ‘90’s.

“There’s this massive customer service gap where brands are unable to meet the real needs of consumers,” says Abinash. “Those real needs are: I want everything now, I want it always on and available and I don’t want to be put on hold. Please respect my time.”

Bridging the Gap to Deliver Service That Respects Customers’ Time

Customers aren’t actually asking for that much — they just want what they’re getting in every other area of their lives. Today, that means being able to self-serve via an app or online, and having the freedom to contact customer service in ways that aren’t colossally time-consuming or inconvenient.

As Abinash puts it, “The world is transforming.”

Messaging alone can yield huge payoff both in terms of scale and in terms of customer satisfaction. Customers aren’t yoked to a phone call (goodbye hold music!) and can engage and re-engage on their own time. Abinash calls this “asynchronous messaging” — the idea that just because you walk away from your phone for a few minutes, the conversation doesn’t disappear or hang up on you.

But perhaps the bigger potential for messaging is the level at which it can be automated. Through what Abinash terms “hyper-scale automation,” brands can reconceptualise operations that were previously run manually (and therefore slowly) to be fully or partially automated. This can be done through bots, robotic process automation, AI-powered ticket routing — the list goes on.

For example, Helpshift introduced messaging without automation technology to one of the largest gaming companies in the world. With 3,000 agents, Helpshift’s messaging technology enabled the company to handle 92% higher ticket volume than the average contact center. Just by moving from phone to asynchronous messaging the company was doing an order of magnitude more work than any traditional contact center. Then, Helpshift introduced automation technology. Through bots that collected upfront information from customers, automated ticket routing, and simple workflows for commonly asked questions, the company automated 60% of its inbound requests within six months.

And how did customers feel about this? “The result was high CSAT. Customers were happier!” explains Abinash. They got their questions answered more efficiently and more accurately, because those who did need to speak to an agent were routed to the agent best equipped for their issue — no more transferring from department to department or agent to agent. “The future of work in a contact center needs to be re-evaluated,” says Abinash.

It’s not just customers and C-levels who are happy about the new contact center. The agent satisfaction numbers are also really high because they’re no longer consumed by rote and routine ticket triage, which is now handled by bots. This leaves only the interesting, ad-hoc issues for agents to resolve — which is more engaging and rewarding. “The symbiosis becomes really important where the bots can partner people, to really perform very high-level work,” says Abinash.

Reconceptualising Customer Service as an Asset, Not a Cost Centre

“The reason Amazon is a trillion-dollar company is because it looks to customer service as a strategic asset, while traditional brands just throw a call centre together in Manila and focus on how to reduce costs,” explains Abinash. Digital-first brands are using customer service as a product or a service capability — and it’s paying off as a competitive advantage against legacy organisations.

“If traditional brands don’t transform digitally and focus on emulating the ways and means of Amazon, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb or Tesla, their game is over,” says Abinash. “That’s the modern world.”

Don’t miss Helpshift’s customer keynote at the upcoming Customer Contact Week (CCW) Europe 2020 event in October in Amsterdam. In the meantime, watch a short demo by clicking here