The irony of improving technology to better serve customers is that the better technology leads to…greater expectations of customer service. That is, as the technology improves, so do customer expectations.
For example, not too long ago, the idea was unheard of that I could go online to your association website, log in, see and update my profile, order products, join and renew, register for events, and so on. It was really fantasy thinking. But the technology caught up (i.e., improved) and now this is the standard, the baseline of customer service.
What about predictive analytics and artificial intelligence? Thanks to Amazon, Netflix, and others, our customers are now expecting us to be able to tell them what they should be buying, based on their past behavior. Fantasy, right? No longer. Now it’s the baseline.
It’s an infinite loop. A positive one, to be sure, but one that never ends. Just like all of areas of data management, it’s a process, not an event.