The current context has raised the level of customer expectations, people wanting uplifting experiences from your business. But as a business owner, how can you provide these experiences if you don’t make the effort to invest in the process of digitizing your customer service center?
The products or services offered are just one part of the success of a business. Customer service is an essential part of the success of any business in 2022. A good reputation increases trust, brings churned customers back, and attracts new customers. But when it comes to planning a customer service approach, we can’t just let it happen, can we?
We live in the digital age where there is an abundance of data available to analyze and obtain information that can provide those uplifting experiences that customers expect from you.
What is a Customer Service Roadmap?
A short definition would be: a customer service roadmap is a high-level visual summary of your customer service vision and goals for a specific period. The roadmap will be a strategic tool for pursuing goals. It must be easy to navigate so that everything about it is clear to anybody – the vision and objectives.
The consulting firm Gartner has made a list of assumptions for the next 2 years, in terms of strategic planning of call centers.
- By 2024, organizations that offer an “all-inclusive experience” will outperform their competitors by 25% in terms of satisfaction.
- By 2025, 40% of customer service organizations will become profit centers.
- By 2025, 80% of customer service organizations will be abandoning native mobile apps for third-party messaging (such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger).
- By 2025, 10% of contact centers will rethink their organization charts to create clustered groups that are committed to the well-being of the relationship between certain customer segments.
Starting from those assumptions, Gartner also raised 10 dilemmas that any call center organization could face in the next 3-5 years.
10 Dilemmas That Will Influence Customer Service
Let’s take them one at a time and analyze them:
Service Channels Versus Multiexperience (MX)
For the customer experience, digital interactions become a necessity, although the voice is a preference. To change direction, businesses need to create points of attraction and persuasion to convert customers to move on to multiple experiences.
Reactive and/or Proactive
Through automation and artificial intelligence, CSS organizations can move to the next level very quickly, which we talked about in a previous blog post. This upgrade will allow you to proactively engage your customers with the right message at the right time and through the right channel.
Work From Anywhere Versus Contact Center
The pandemic has brought with it a rapid, global implementation of work-from-anywhere. And this has forced a rethinking of the work model, bringing with it many benefits: reduced real estate costs, access to a much wider range of talent, increased efficiency, and increased retention rates.
CSS organizations need to consider which is best for them – a 100% WFA model, a 100% contact center model, or a hybrid model.
Choosing the Optimal Channels
It is necessary to start with segmentation and alignment of channels, products, and services. Supporting all channels leads to poor results and high costs.
Service Department Versus Customer Teams
Using digital interactions to automate day-to-day customer service tasks will increase the demand for faster, more complex tasks. At the same time, it brings with it a rethinking of the agile organizational model focused on the well-being of the client.
Best-of-Breed Solutions Versus Customer Service Suite
CSS is seen as an increasingly important factor in customer experience. But the customer service experience is disarticulated, with gaps and discrepancies between channels and stages of the process. Without an optimized core set of integrated functional capabilities, CSS organizations will not be able to fulfil their service experience visions.
Developing a customer service application strategy that includes thinking about modular applications will be critical in the next few years.
Human and/or “Thing” Customer
At the moment, the process looks something like this: the call center representative needs to assess the urgency, then respond, execute, communicate, and then assess the degree of satisfaction through direct contact with the customer. Gartner also conducted a survey, in which respondents indicated that by 2030 they expect to serve “things” more than twice as often as in 2020.
Cost Center Versus Profit Center
Business models will be forced to adapt to digital interactions. From broader customer service desires to increased profitability, from transactional to mission-critical, and so on.
Customer Journey Versus Life Journey
It is necessary to start with segmentation and alignment of channels, products, and services. Supporting all channels leads to poor results and high costs.
Employee Versus Freelance/Flex
Clashing with existing customer and employee trends could lead to a boom in independent customer service work, changing the relationship between the service organization and the customer.
Conclusion
Experts in the field have been analyzing customer service data for several years and have listed the key ingredients of a successful customer service operation.
Professionals who plan to create such a roadmap should consider:
- Creating a proactive customer service strategy for understanding customer needs, contact being valuable and very clear to them, and meeting their expectations. Creating a proactive customer journey and adapting to this continuous change.
- Analyzing, optimizing, and prioritizing the next steps for the organization. For example, long-term work-from-anywhere implementation but taking into account what actions in the past have become less useful. Looking at the onboarding process of the new colleagues, this can no longer happen with 2-3 full days of presentations at the company’s headquarters. And this is just one example of many.
- Transforming processes and services into “things” that can be directly configured and controlled by customers.
- Moving the customer service cost center to a profit center.
