Is the End in Sight for Customer Service?

How we define customer service can change depending upon the industry, audience and even product. There are the few elite products that can stand alone, regardless of the customer service delivered along the way. For the rest of us, the focus has to be on the customer experience. But has call center management clearly defined this for all audiences? If so, is it subject to change?

Interestingly enough, this was the top of a recent SmallBizTrends piece in reference to this year’s ExCom 2016 event. A former Gartner (News - Alert) analyst and founder of ThinkJar Research, Esteban Kolsky believes that the way customer service exists today will be gone in 10 years. The reason for the demise is the current path of customer service. The customer community is starting to take shape and in 2025, no one will want to do customer service.

According to Kolsky, everything that is happening right now is so wrong that it cannot be sustained over time. He believes that no matter what call center management does, customers will never be happy. You may be able to satisfy them on a case-by-case basis, but Kolsky believes that trying to make customers happy overall is the worst thing a business can do. Why? It costs time, money and other resources that aren’t available to strive for something that can’t be achieved.

Of course, Kolsky highlights that while companies may claim that they are trying to make customers happy, they really aren’t. To be truly successful, there has to be a balance between the company and the customer. There has to be a benefit for the customer, but also a benefit for the company. The business has to be sustainable and spending too much on customer care will eventually lead to an elimination of the department or the company.

Kolsky suggests that customer service was never really meant to exist. It evolved simply because we moved from a production economy to a service economy. Plus, when you add multiple channels or social media to the mix, companies create even more problems. They launch channels they don’t know how to manage and push out communications and then don’t respond to requests.

Instead, the wave of the future is in communities. Customers aren’t really looking for call center management to assign an agent so they can complain – they just want answers. Think about the way customers behave today. If they have a question, they take it to Google (News - Alert) to look for an answer. If the customer service department can’t operate the same way, customers will look elsewhere.

Does this argument have merit? It certainly matches consumer behavior, but does that mean customer service won’t exist or it will simply get a facelift? Is the future of your customer service on the chopping block?

Edited by Stefania Viscusi