- About Us
Customer Service Faces Cultural Upheaval With Coming Of 'Silent Generation', Major Report Warns
16 Apr 2008
Organisations must adapt to serve high expectations of IT-confident, phone-shy customers of the future
The customer service industry will face its biggest challenge to date in coming years as changing generations of consumers demand to interact with contact centres over differing technology platforms, a new report warns. Those organisations that fail to interact with customers of the future using emerging media platforms - such as social networks - as well as traditional phone channels, will suffer, according to the report’s authors.
“The Customer of the Future” study, created by customer service analyst group ContactBabel on behalf of contact centre technology providers JAM IP, Cisco, and Exony argues that today’s IT-savvy children – the so-called ‘Silent Generation’ – will choose to use technology over direct communications to contact organisations. Their buying behaviour will also be heavily influenced by the social networks they interact with.
According to Steve Morrell, principal analyst at ContactBabel: “The way we communicate is changing and customer service will have to reflect this going forward. Organisations will have to keep up with the explosion in new customer communications techniques and technologies, be it voice, text, instant messenger, web or email,” he said. “Communities of like-minded people, such as those on Second Life, blogs or MySpace, hold growing influence over purchasing patterns and provide invaluable opportunities for businesses to meet customers and collaborate with them, as well as for consumers to talk with others before purchasing.”
Suzette Bouzane Meadows, market development director for contact centre services organisation JAM IP, believes that the communication demands of the ‘customer of the future’ could be a catalyst for change for many businesses.
“Organisations are going to have to deal with several different generations at once, each with particular demands and preferences. The telephone will continue to be the channel of choice for many, and with the population ageing this won’t change any time soon. E-commerce will continue to grow and people will continue to demand better and better service. And now there will be a new generation of consumers who are not influenced by traditional marketing methods and are extremely technically savvy. It is a complicated mix that has the potential to add considerable cost to operations if not carefully planned. Understanding your customer base and your business processes is going to be more important than ever.”
Dave Thomson, European marketing manager, Contact Centre Solutions, Cisco, added: “Technology has already helped improve contact centre service. The customer of the future will expect 24/7/365 service and will be highly confident talking to avatars, using self-service or 3D video demonstrations. Organisations that want to remain competitive will need to make sure they have the right communications infrastructure in place to support these applications and to deliver a high level of service.”
The report also states that expectation levels from consumers will rise to the point that to remain competitive organisations will have to almost entirely eliminate queuing. Call back, wait time announcements, natural language recognition and predictive answer solutions will all have to feature.
Rex Dorricott, CEO of interaction management software provider Exony, said: “The customer of the future will expect anyone they communicate with to be knowledgeable and empowered to make decisions. Companies will have to find innovative new ways to harvest the complete organisational knowledge and make it available to every employee, and will need to turn to experts to help empower them.”
Seven key areas were identified as crucial to businesses that are looking to succeed in customer management going forward:
1) The death of the queue: the customer of the future will not be prepared to wait
2) Some customers are more equal than others: calls need to be handled more intelligently to prioritise some ‘higher value’ customers over others
3) Mind the gap: many lower value communications will be automated
4) Technology catch-up: the customer of the future will be tech-savvy and want to communicate over a number of channels
5) Customer service is everyone’s job: the customer of the future will contact an organisation and be answered by the right resource with the right knowledge
6) The all-seeing, all-knowing employee: in the future, customers will expect the people they communicate with to be knowledgeable and empowered to make decisions
7) Customer service is the new advertising: customers will ignore advertising in the future and instead use social networks and peer sites to make purchasing decisions
The “Customer of the Future” report is available for download at http://contactbabel-downloads.com/
-ends-
About JAM IP
JAM IP is a leading contact centre services organisation specialising in consulting, professional services, software development, systems integration and managed services.
JAM IP operates independently as a Centre of Excellence within the KCOM Group and has delivered innovative customer contact solutions for many organisations across the UK, including Admiral Insurance, Teleperformance, Travelsphere, Ocado, and Dial-a-Phone.
JAM IP is part of the KCOM Group.
About Exony
Exony is the leading provider of interaction management software for virtualised customer contact operations. Exony Virtualized Interaction ManagerTM (VIM) enables operators of virtual contact centres to measure customer interaction experience, efficiency and effectiveness and manage available resources through making immediate tactical or planned strategic changes.
Built on Exony’s experience and understanding of virtualized customer interaction, VIM incorporates four modules - Reporting and Analytics, Resource Management, Connect and Service Management, all within the proven Exony Virtualization Framework for security, partitioning and user interaction.
Exony Virtualized Interaction Manager empowers virtualised customer contact operations for organisations across Europe and North America including Affiniti, Alliance & Leicester, BT, Cable & Wireless, France Telecom, HBOS, HSBC, La Poste, Microsoft, National Australia Group, Nectar, Transport for London, UK Home Office, Virgin Trains, Virgin Media and Vodafone.
For more information please contact:
PR Contacts
Chris Lee / Chris Measures
Rainier PR
+44 (0)20 7494 6570
exony@rainierpr.co.uk
About ContactBabel
ContactBabel are the contact centre industry experts. If you have a question about how the industry works, or where it’s heading, the chances are we have the answer.
The coverage provided by our massive and ongoing primary research projects is matched by our experience analysing the contact centre industry. We understand how technology, people and process best fit together, and how they will work collectively in the future.
We help the biggest and most successful vendors develop their contact centre strategies and talk to the right prospects. We have shown the UK government how the contact centre industry will develop and change. We help contact centres compare themselves to their closest competitors so they can understand what they are doing well and what needs to improve.
If you have a question about your company’s place in the contact centre industry, perhaps we can help you.
Email: info@contactbabel.com
Website: www.contactbabel.com
Telephone: 0870 770 3337
About Cisco
Cisco's Unified Customer Contact solutions provide an open platform that extend customer care beyond simple phone transactions and the traditional contact centre to unique content-rich customer centric experiences. These solutions let organisations uniquely personalise their communications with individual customers through a variety of media including voice, Web, e-mail and video. For more information, please visit www.cisco.com/go/cc
Back to News