I’ve talked to hundreds of customer service leaders around the world about their strategies and challenges.  One of the questions I’m often asked is about the big trends we see coming down the pike.

Before talking about where we’re going, I usually tell our members that they first need to think about where we’ve been. 

Without a doubt, the biggest single trend we’ve seen over the past five years has been the shift away from a rote focus on productivity to a much greater focus on the quality of the customer experience. 

Some suggest the “Great Recession” has prompted a return to productivity focus, but we think the rumors of quality’s demise are premature.  As a trend, it’s better to think of the shift toward quality as “global warming,” not simply a “warm summer.”

The reasons the productivity era is over are widely known: 

• The difficulty reducing AHT in an increasingly complex world
• The advent of social media to spread poor customer experiences far and wide
• CEO focus on customer retention

To be sure, there are still pockets of the economy where customer service is still treated as a productivity game; but for the rest of us, we moved AHT lower on our dashboards a long time ago and have started focusing more on quality measures like Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score.

If our annual member poll is any indication, the economic downturn didn’t derail this march toward quality.  What the recession has done, however, is bring a sharper focus to the way service leaders think about how they will get to their quality goals.  

In 2006, the conversations we had about attaining service quality centered on things like giving frontline reps greater empowerment to help the customer.  Today, customer service leaders are more interested in things like: 

• Reducing customer effort – the way to customer loyalty isn’t about “delighting” them, it’s about making service interactions low effort
• Forward-resolving issues on the first call to avoid downstream callbacks – roughly 45% of callbacks can be avoided by adopting this approach, which we call Next Issue Avoidance
• Boosting the stickiness of self-serve channels so customers don’t have to pick up the phone – nearly 60% of inbound call volume is from customers who first visited the company’s Website; society has now reached the tipping point where customers actually prefer to self serve than to call a company for support

We think the title of our principal research initiative last year—“Cost Savings Customers Want”—captures this new budget-conscious quality focus nicely.  The recession didn’t force us to abandon our quality hopes; it just forced us to think harder about how to get there.

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