The Customer Service Model of the Future

The customer servicemodel of the future Creating intelligent experiences customers expect Creating intelligent experiences customers expect02As digital disruption becomes more pervasive, large global companies are feeling more pressure than ever to substantially raise their customer service game.It’s time for companies to trade their increasingly inefficient and ineffective traditional service model for a modern, automated, and intelligent one that delivers the service experience today’s and tomorrow’s customers want.Today, in our one-click, always-on society, people have little patience for companies that don’t meet their sky-high expectations. They demand a superior customer experience and, if there’s an issue, they want it to be solved immediately and with minimal effort. In the digital age, first impressions are more critical than ever. Companies can lose customers rapidly and for good if the services they offer lack purpose and intuitive access. This isn’t news to most companies but many are still relying on outdated ways to help their customers. Many companies today still have a rigid, reactive, cumbersome, and high-cost service model that takes too long to resolve customers’ issues. Often times, the same issues are solved over and over and a lack of visibility into the true reasons why customers have those issues leave companies struggling to meet customers’ expectations. This, in turn, has a fundamental negative impact on customer retention, brand loyalty and, ultimately, revenue. It’s time to innovate and transform to a seamless, end-to-end customer service experienceThe fact is, customer service is at a critical crossroad. The traditional service model, based around large, expensive call centers, was built for a different era and is no longer suited in today’s global, digital economy. Companies need an entirely new customer service model—people working differently, with new processes and supported by new technologies—if they want to effectively deliver on their brand promise, retain customer loyalty, and continue to grow and thrive.What does this new model look like? At a high level, it’s dened by four key characteristics.It’s based on customer expectations. Everything should begin with the customer perspective. This will drive the services and communications the company will deliver, how it will deliver them, and the capabilities—the people, processes, as well as technologies—that are necessary to do so.Consider, for example, customers’ changing service channel preferences. Gartner predicts that requests for customer support through consumer mobile messaging applications soon will exceed those for support through traditional social media.1 The increasing use of messenger platforms will require new ways of forecasting, agent-scheduling, and routing.It delivers fast, efficient,high-quality, proactive, and personalized service. Customers should have a single point of contact through which they can get exactly what they need quickly and completely, on the device and through the channel of their choice—which could change over the course of the day. Customers might use a laptop at work to load the initial request, a mobile phone on the train home to check the status, and a tablet at home to follow up. Creating intelligent experiences customers expect03This likely means expanding the traditional call or contact center with a personalized self-service portal through which all customer requests and needs are handled and where any interaction, regardless of how it occurrs (e.g., chat, email, SMS, phone, or portal) is recorded in the customer and case records and available to review via any channel and device. More significantly however, this means a systemic, digital transformation of the traditional Contact Center, not incremental change. It requires activation of knowledge that empowers customers with 24x7x365 access to rich content via a self-serve portal, supported by virtual agentsthat delivers a better customer experience and unlocks productivity by empowering agents to work on more complex issues and deliver higher value services. If further assistance is required from an agent/engineer, then intelligently assign to the best able to assist, based on context, skill, capacity and availability, preserving the customerjourney and enabling real time, intelligent swarming, as needed,to rapidly diagnose and resolve the customer's issue. Customers should also be able to opt-in for such things as proactive communications about open and newly discovered issues, which increases transparency and eliminates the need to re-engage the service center for an update. Additionally, the new service model should enable a company to preemptively solve issues and continuously improve service quality. Customers should always be notified when this has happened so they’re aware of the value and high-quality service they’re getting.This digital transformation should result in significant improvements in customer satisfac