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What’s The Future Of The Help Desk?

The future of the help desk lies in personalization and automation.

The help desk or service desk once consisted of a single man or woman, a telephone, and a list of blanket statements that generally didn’t answer your question. In today’s interconnected smartphone world, the help desk is becoming increasingly personalized and much nicer to deal with. Thanks to big data analytics, the modern help desk has access to a far greater wealth of data both on their own product and your customer history specifically.

As time goes on and our artificial intelligence technology develops, you can expect it to play a greater role in help desks. Now I know, AI helpers and chatbots have a pretty shoddy reputation as customer service reps, but, the customer service bot of the (near) future should be indistinguishable from a human representative. Plus it comes with the bonus of remembering every detail of every transaction and help call you’ve ever made.

For more on that and what else we can expect in the years to come, we asked a group of industry experts…

What’s The Future Of The Help Desk?

Here’s what they had to say…

Nick Francis, CEO & Co-founder of Help Scout


“As customer support tools get smarter, self-service is going to become a lot more relevant, helpful and powerful. In most companies, this means many support professionals will spend more of their time doing proactive, success-oriented activities.

When customers do end up talking with someone, the support team will have everything they need to be helpful in a personalized way: account information, recent in-app activity, and probably a video of the most recent session where the customer ran into trouble. In addition, teams will get assistance from AI-powered suggestions, making it quicker than ever to provide a great experience.”

Carrie Chitsey Wells, Co-founder & COO of One Touch Brands


“The future of the help desk revolves around the consumer wanting everything at their fingertips. The ability for a company to see what the customer is seeing through live video chat, saves the consumer and company time and money.”

Ray Cappola, VP of Help Desk Services at Continuum


“Simple, purpose-built applications, interwoven in personal and business network fabrics, will continue to expand the divide between user simplicity and applied complexity.

The help desk 10 years from now will be there to assist people in connecting the app with no manual to the complex fabrics that construct their business and personal lives. Through continued development in automation, real-time channel delivery, and cross-device/platform telemetry, the help desk of the future will be proactive and provide highly personalized service. This will allow technicians to apply their art and science to help users focus on their objectives, not their technology.”

Patrick Cohen, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, NPower


“More automation is a given as we progress but help desk positions will always involve a human element. These roles will resemble those of today and will evolve with the industry: entry to mid level positions requiring current industry-standard certifications and demonstrative experience.

While some may offer more of a white glove service that will attract candidates with superior professional or customer service skills, the role will always be a necessity when addressing technology repair needs. The difference will relate to how individuals prepare for these jobs.

It has been proven that these roles can be filled with accelerated and targeted non-degree training programs like NPower. While some employers are open to hiring talent from training pipelines, overall the industry is slow to expand hiring purviews. We are expecting and planning for this change and we are actively working towards increasing our capacity to train more students to meet future demand.”

Erik Kangas, CEO of LuxSci


“The key to a successful and noteworthy help desk is the ability to solve problems quickly with minimal time and impact on the customer. In 10-15 years, everyone’s interactions with the world will be completely centered around whatever phones/tablets have become.

Help desk interactions will be centered around a new and uniform user interface paradigm built into these devices which handles voice, video, and chat, automatic tracking and logging of the interactions, automatic user identity verification and correlation with service and account, and automatic enforcement of accountability through direct performance metrics and direct integration with social media and company rating systems.

Contacting a helpdesk in 10-15 years will be initiated verbally. Your device will connect, log you in, present your account and relevant history to the technicians, and start a new case or resume a case within seconds and without any aggravation on your part. Then, its fluid communication with accountability.”

Bob Herman, Co-founder & President of We Heal Computers


“The days of agent-filled rooms sitting in a call center overseas are numbered. Mobility, necessity and locality will result in the uberization of the Help Desk. Support will be moments away provided by a diverse network of pre-screened and qualified agents looking to fulfill their entrepreneurial calling and/or in search of supplemental income. Improvements in remote connectivity, knowledge base technologies and cross-platform presence will further accelerate the move to a faster more efficient help desk.”

About the author

Nick Hastreiter

I write about the future of business. I approach this by interviewing founders, CEO's, and other game changers to share their vision for the future of their industry.

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