This week, companies around the world will observe “Customer Service Week” to celebrate their customers and the contact center employees that service them. This year is significant for several reasons. Back in 2008 when the global recession hit, companies scrambled to find new ways to retain customers in a highly competitive environment. As a result, many companies innovated at breakneck speed to create a new and differentiated customer experience. Over the past year, the benefits from much of this innovation, and from best practices that were unleashed several years ago, have come to fruition across the Fortune 500 and Global 1000. Let’s explore three major trends that give me pause to celebrate this year – and look forward to the year ahead.
Employees are Now Considered a Customer Service Asset: At the end of the day, delivering exceptional customer service is about the people on the front lines. In the past, employees were considered a necessary cost to keep the wheels of the contact center moving, and they were treated as such: training was minimal, tools were pre-historic, and customer data resided in 3-4 different systems. Today, companies are taking a 180-degree shift and making investments in their employees to create world-class customer service organizations. With our customers, we’ve seen companies abandon siloed WFO tools in favor of complete and integrated WFO suites. Over the past year, Genesys has worked with many customers to implement our integrated WFO solution that incorporates WFM, quality recording and management, training, and unified desktops. Ultimately, the customer benefits from empowered supervisors and engaged agents.
Social and Mobile are Driving Innovation: Today, smart phones are the new customer service platform with over 50 percent of users preferring to contact customer service via their smart phone. Unfortunately, many apps are disconnected from the contact center. Now, however, companies starting to link their smart phone apps with the contact center to include context, history, and information to agents whenever live service is required. In 2013, expect more innovations that connect mobile apps with the contact center.
There’s no argument that social media is now a legitimate customer service channel – approximately 3 percent (and growing) of customer service interactions flow through social media channels. Like mobile, social media also remains siloed from the contact center within the marketing or public relations organizations. This past year Genesys witnessed more and more companies linking their social media operations to the contact center. Over the next year, expect more companies to follow suit and break down the walls between the marketing and customer service organizations.
The Cloud is Democratizing Customer Service: During the economic meltdown, companies experimented with new and cost effective ways to deploy their customer service operations — and the cloud was a viable alternative. Despite the doom and gloom predicted by IT organizations regarding security, lack of flexibility, and data integrity – many of these dire predictions never came to pass. This past year, we witnessed the democratization of customer service to new customers across the marketplace. In fact, Genesys recently partnered with Salesforce.com to combine its Service Cloud Platform with Genesys to deliver a new class of customer service solutions in the cloud to a wide spectrum of companies.
I could probably add another 20 reasons to this list – which underscores why we have reason to celebrate this year’s Customer Service Week. Companies are listening to their customers: They’re investing and innovating to create the ultimate customer experience across any channel. They’re investing in and empowering their employees and customer facing resources. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings and what we can celebrate in 2013.
Enjoyed your blog post. We’ve found another way to celebrate customer service through our short film, Please Hold. You can watch it at pleaseholdfilm.com Thanks.