Customer Service As We Know It Has Changed

What is was customer service?

  • All customer engagement in the post-sales customer journey
  • Support to enable better use of a product or a service
  • A mandatory investment that adds to cost (and this needs optimization to manage revenues)

Yes, but no.

All this has changed in the last five years, and how! Customer service today breaks the barriers of pre- and post-sale engagements. Thanks to digital adoption and omnichannel engagement strategies, customer service activities span the entire customer lifecycle. Customers make no differentiation on whether they are seeking support before or after a purchase journey and expect a consistent experience with every interaction. Consequently, customer service has also established itself as an active channel capable of creating incremental revenue streams for every business.

The Evolution Is Not Lost On Any Enterprise

Despite limited tech spending budgets, global CIO investment priorities surface customer service as a key investment area for their business. Forrester’s April 2020 COVID-19 Service Provider Pulse Survey reveals the shifting priorities of CIOs across every industry. Sixty-six percent of service providers report that clients are pausing or cutting down investments toward marketing, demand generation, and advertising, while 62% of their clients are growing their investments toward customer service.

Finally, the pandemic reinforced the need to lead with service. Customer service all but collapsed into superficial “we’re here” messages for most enterprises. Every business needs to solve for the massive backlog of pending service tickets, customer complaints, and unresolved issues before planning any marketing interventions.

It is now time for global enterprises to start thinking very differently about customer service and start investing in making customer service the new revenue channel. This also means that customer service and marketing need to get up close and personal to win and retain customer trust.

Join me at Summit Asia Pacific to explore:

  1. Three business-critical functions that customer service makes a big impact on.
  2. Our top strategies to understand how to leverage customer service better to drive revenues.
  3. Our best-practice recommendations to get you started on the journey to making customer service the new marketing.

Click here for registration and more information about the event.