Source – digitalistmag.com
Long gone are the days when customer service meant investing in a telephone system, hiring a team of contact center agents, and sitting by the phone waiting for the customer to call. The motto used to be, “If the customer is unhappy, they will call us.” Now it’s “What can we do today to make customers happy?”
Meeting customer needs in today’s demanding marketplace requires flexible and agile customer service solutions. Microservices are a way to increase speed and flexibility in getting new innovations to customers. With microservices, you can more easily adapt to the changing customer requests and demands, as well as offer services that create a competitive edge.
Microservices: Growing and building in real-time
Think about the process of moving into a new house. Instead of waiting for the whole house to be built, you might want to move in when the core components are up and running: The kitchen, bathroom, living room, and bedrooms. After some time passes, you decide to renovate. You add a new laundry room and a few extra windows to the living room. Later, you see that your neighbor has a beautiful balcony and you want to add a similar one to your home. In a few years, you realize you don’t need so many bedrooms after all, and decide to change one into a personal office.
This is how microservices work: The actual application consists of individual building blocks, each serving a specific purpose. These building blocks are combined to form a solution that meets your customer service needs.
In the whitepaper, “Microservices–Rewriting the Future Rules of Customer Service,” written by Esteban Kolsky from thinkJar, Kolsky investigates six ways that microservices can help deliver better customer service experiences:
1. Channel-agnostic
Microservices make it easier to add new contact channels as the need arises. You can start with the ones that are essential to your business today and add new ones when you and your customers need them.
2. Infinite elasticity
Microservices are built on cloud platforms, so you can start small and scale up as your business grows. You don’t need to worry about the technology limiting your future growth—it will grow with you.
3. Resolve once, share with many
Customers expect consistent customer service over time and through all channels. According to Kolsky, microservices make the needed levels of consistency easy, allowing central data stores of answers to propagate across whichever channels your customers like to use.
4. Performance increase
Powerful and rapidly scalable cloud platforms make it easier to maintain high performance, even during peak seasons. Kolsky says, “Microservices scale as needed using the cloud’s ability to quickly deliver additional capacity. This means you never fall short in busy periods.”
5. Access to resources
Kolsky calls it the “delight gap:” The needed information is somewhere within the organization, but is it not accessible for customer service when needed. Microservices use a common data store, which make it easier to access the relevant data whenever needed.
6. Cost savings
As Kolsky notes, customer service is finally recognized as a core business investment. With the scalable cloud platforms, companies can avoid excess investments and save costs. The increased speed of innovation also means the customer gets new features and enhancements faster.