Sometimes it's hard to think of customer service in any context other than CRM, web site FAQs, knowledge bases, IVR systems and outsourced call centers, but commerce and customer service existed well before globalization and the Internet. A typical customer-service interaction used to entail a back-and-forth dialogue between customer and merchant, until a mutually agreeable resolution was reached. Communication, empathy and understanding were the enablers for successful service interactions.
Today, there are cost pressures to deflect service requests from live CSRs and time-saving, productivity-enhancing technologies that purport to "improve" the customer-service function across interaction channels. The inherent problem with many of these process and technology trends is their company-centric bias; they improve productivity or throughput but rarely improve the customer's perception of the resolution experience.
Interaction
Though traditional...
