According to Tim Joyce, Chief Innovation Officer of Xerox Customer Care, business success stories during the past 100 years were primarily about products. He says that now we're moving towards a world where success and value propositions will be based on service. Of course we'll still need products, but he says our purchases will be more about the services wrapped around them. Consumers will be permanently connected to sophisticated help desks that watch and anticipate customer needs. Joyce believes that technology in the future will make customer’s lives much better—and he doesn’t see technology replacing humans. Much like the people who at IBM run Watson, he believes technology will enhance the customer’s experience. Technology will eventually even prevent customers from having to contact customer care at all. Perhaps our products will talk to us and fix themselves for us.

He says human agents will still be in the mix but their role will be very different from what it is today. People who run customer experience will still manage the brand's customer care architecture, drawing upon trends highlighted by their virtual counterpart, to maintain the feedback loop and action the necessary changes to better serve customers and better reflect the values of the brand. It'll be their job to ensure their virtual counterpart behaves and evolves appropriately, so that every customer experience is seamless. In this podcast we talk about this and much more.

More about podcast guest Tim Joyce:

Tim Joyce is the Chief Innovation Officer for Xerox Customer Care.

Tim believes that the relationship between consumers and brands will change radically as artificial intelligence systems roll out. In this rapidly changing landscape, innovators will thrive and laggards will suffer.

Tim was educated in Oxford and Durham where he studied Computing and Mathematics. In the early days of the web, he was an ecommerce specialist, pioneering online shopping in the UK. At Xerox he has lead software development, solutions, product and research functions, and now heads innovation. He is a strong believer in -- and has published several papers on -- Agile and Lean, and brings these disciplines to every engagement. Tim is passionate about building innovative software products and solutions that deliver a fantastic user experience. He lives on the Jurassic Coast in Poole, U.K., with his wife Jenny and 3 girls. In his spare time, he enjoys sailing, cycling and playing chess.

More posts from Tim Joyce:

Five Products with Embedded Customer Care

Seats Plus Software: The New Model For Customer Care