The Future of Customer Support

In our first article of the 3-part Future of Customer Support series, we covered the case for change and how organisations can adapt to meet changing customer expectations.

Across both the second and third articles, we discuss how organisations can design user-centric and efficient customer support operating models, by examining best practices across nine operating model layers. In the second article we discussed the first four layers of the operating model – customer segments, channels, products & services and processes. In this article, the third and final of the series, we address the remaining five layers – organisation, location, people, technology, and data.

We use the term ‘customer’ loosely here, as these concepts can be applied to Business to Business (B2B), Business to Customer (B2C) users, or other customer types, which may vary by industry. In Life Sciences, for example, the customer can take the form of Healthcare Practitioners (HCPs), patients, insurers, governments and more.

Organisation

Many customer service leaders ask themselves how they can best structure their organisation for success. They might wonder:

• How can my organisation build trust and maintain customer intimacy (e.g. through linguistic and cultural proximity) while tapping into the cost-efficiencies offered by global standardisation?
• How can my team enable the wider commercial function by turning into a value centre?

Successful customer service leaders will then look beyond their own function and explore their place in the wider commercial organisation. Much more than just being a cost centre, customer service can play a valuable role in enabling sales teams and improving the overall customer experience, ultimately leading to higher revenues and happier customers. The customer service team may sit within the commercial organisation, or may exist as a separate function, as outlined in Figure 1:

Figure 1. Customer service and the commercial organisation: Advantages and disadvantages of two common organisational design options.

Figure 1 describes why some organisations prefer to have customer service as part of their commercial function, while others run it as a separate global function. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, what successful organisations have in common, are clearly defined roles and responsibilities, a strong governance model and a rich source of customer insights to inform their decision-making.

Effective governance and closer collaboration between Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing, allows the insights generated from customers to be made more visible across the organisation and used more efficiently. This ultimately increases revenue opportunities, marketing effectiveness and the overall customer experience.

Location

Many organisations structure their customer service function to take advantage of labour arbitrage (we explore this in our previous article). The physical location of customer agents will also be determined by their operating model and level of centralisation. This typically takes the form of one of the three structures outlined in Figure 2:

Figure 2. Types of global operating model.

Each of the models shown in Figure 2 comes with distinct advantages and disadvantages. The most suitable model will always depend on an organisation’s priorities and strategic objectives. Full centralisation and full decentralisation mark opposing ends of the spectrum. The hub & spoke model provides a balance between both – driving standardisation while allowing flexibility for local procedures, regulations, and customer requirements. For this model, organisations typically benefit from setting up a centrally governed Centre of Excellence (CoE), which provides standardised policies, processes and back-office support to all regions and local markets, including training and knowledge management.

The number, and location, of the regional hubs and spokes will depend on customer needs and the organisation’s budget and risk tolerance. The most suitable locations therefore require a sensible balance between time zones, cultural similarities, local languages/dialects, labour cost and talent availability in the region.

Using Latin America as an example, hubs are often established in Mexico or Costa Rica, covering Central and North America, as well as the northern parts of South America. In Europe, typical locations include both Poland and the Czech Republic, where labour is comparatively inexpensive and there is wider availability of resources who can speak multiple languages.

With 40-60% of simple queries expected to be resolved by self-service channels in the future, and another 15-20% resolved through a low-cost primary service desk, customer service agents can be freed up to focus on what really matters: High-priority requests, complex queries, and top-tier customers. The role of customer service agents can evolve to create a new relationship with customers, based on proactive support, an advisory role and in some cases virtual sales for smaller accounts.

This shift in the role of customer support agents means that the capabilities, skill sets, and characteristics required will be significantly different. Figure 3 outlines this changing role and the capabilities that organisations must train and recruit for, to underpin the customer service function of the future.

Figure 3. The changing role of customer service agents and the capabilities required.

Freed up from administrative activities, and equipped with additional capacity and the right skills, customer service agents can support sales activities through up-selling, cross-selling and virtual sales to smaller accounts, which may not be viable for sales agents to target. Agents can increase customer retention by ‘farming’ and nurturing existing relationships through effective inbound and outbound calls. This allows sales agents to focus on ‘hunting’ – and thereby new customer acquisition.

Through the increased availability of intelligent automation as well as cloud-based platforms, organisations are rethinking both their employee-facing and customer-facing technology landscapes to reduce cost, improve the customer experience and transform themselves into data-driven businesses. Some examples of technologies that customer service functions can use are as follows:

Employee-facing technologies

• The consolidation of agent desktops is a simple but powerful way to reduce the number of screens and platforms required
• AI-driven predictive analytics tools, including GPT4.0, can help companies to draw insights from end-to-end customer data to track, predict, and personalise the customer journey
• Machine Learning can be trained to recognise the embedded emotions in language and determine a customer’s mood from their voice, prioritise customer issues or build a deeper understanding of the experience
• Enhancing system setup and access to customer agents to provide the flexibility to work from home when needed

Customer-facing technologies

• Self-service automation can bring greater efficiency, by allowing customers to address their own queries and bringing efficiencies to customer service operations
• Conversational AI (e.g. via a webchat) can be used to handle many common queries, providing instant support for customers, while freeing up agents to focus on more complex tasks
• Effective knowledge management builds a strong foundation for automation/cognitive tools and self-serve technologies. The best contact centres depend on internal data that is accurate, actionable, and accessible

There is no universal approach when it comes to selecting the most suitable technologies for a customer service function. Making the right choices requires a deep dive into an organisation’s technical landscape, priorities, and maturity.

Many organisations spend significant amounts of investment dollars getting to know their customers, educating them, and understanding white spaces in the market. Meanwhile, contact centres tend to be rich sources of customer data and can help to answer questions such as:

• Who are your customers?
• Why do your customers buy from your organisation?
• What are their preferences?
• What are their concerns? What are their primary challenges with your products and services?
• How could you improve what you offer customers and how could you expand your market reach?

The answers to these questions, and many more, can often be found in contact centres. However this information largely remains underutilised. Some examples of effective sharing of customer insights across sales, marketing and customer service include:

• Common customer concerns can be addressed in educational campaigns using the insights collected, reducing spend on 3^rd party market research
• Sales and marketing teams receive insights on customer demographics, segments and personas, order volumes, buying behaviour and concerns, thus helping sales teams to identify white spaces and enabling marketing teams to focus on the right topics
• In return, customer service teams can plan better, ramping up resources and reducing them in a timely way, if they are kept informed of campaigns in the region which may impact call volumes

In many organisations the potential for data-driven improvements is vast, especially when underpinned by rich data sources, stitched together effectively, to provide deep organisational insights and a 360-degree customer view.

Where does this leave you?

The future of customer service is exciting, with new possibilities offered by digitisation, human closeness and a transformation into a true value-centre for the wider business.

This journey is, however, unlikely to be easy. There are many known obstacles on the road, and often some unanticipated ones. In organisations with differing levels of maturity, each customer service function has its own path. For assistance with specific challenges, brainstorming, support, or advice on best practice, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Contribution/Author:

Henriette Bucher
Senior Manager, Consulting