Customer service is a great research beat. It never goes out of style. Customers are never going to run out of questions and problems. Delivering answers and solutions will always be the key to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability—for companies of all sizes, in every industry, in every geography. I’m staying with it.
Across my five years of research in this practice area, customer service has changed and evolved, delivering answers and solutions across more phases of the customer lifecycle, using new channels, and leveraging new and improved technologies. I’ve changed, too. You may remember Web self-service, cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service, and KM-based customer service. This specialization was important at the time because all of us had such a narrow view of customer service—using the contact center to deliver answers to questions and solutions to problems that customers have in installing and using your products and services. I felt that I had to get your attention by giving customer service names that connoted something about channels and/or technologies.
No longer.
Now, we call it “customer service” and it encompasses all channels, all phases of the customer lifecycle, and all customer service technologies. In my research, I want to help companies deliver customer service at the right time, on the right channel, using the right technologies to answer questions and solve problems.
With this week’s 1Q2010 Customer Service Company and Product update, I’ve begun my sixth year of quarterly reports on customer service. In our 1Q2010 Customer Service Company and Product Update, I continued to see four key trends in customer service: social media, assisted-service, mobile computing, and cloud computing. Think of these trends as new tactics in the customer lifecycle, as new channels, as new and improving technologies for delivering answers and solutions.
In a nutshell, 1Q2010 was a steady quarter for customer service. Customer growth was about the same in 1Q2010 as it was in the very good 4Q2009. And it was the same for financial performance (because customer growth is the key driver for financial performance). Overall, product activity was light, but Attensity Group, nGenera CIM, and RightNow made significant product announcements. Overall, company activity was light, too, but Attensity Group launched a subsidiary to serve the federal market, RightNow introduced an innovative new product subscription agreement, and Salesforce.com formed a partnership with VMware to deliver Java development and a Java infrastructure to its cloud computing platform.
Customer
Service Company and Product Update, 1Q2010
A Steady
1Q2010 for Customer Service
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, June 17,
2010
