Nearly all of my recent conversations and interactions of late have started with the same framing: The world has changed.

Admittedly, this is a relatively generic framing, but supplement it with data around rapidly increasing contact complexity, far more nuanced products and solutions, and complicated technology—not to mention customer expectations that now are dramatically heightened—and it quickly becomes apparent at how drastically different the service and support function of today is from that of even a year or two ago.

In fact, in some recent research, CCC highlights the function’s shift to what we call the “Quality 2.0 Era,” which is characterized by both complex issues and heightened customer expectations.  This is a long way from the “Productivity Era” of the late 1990s, early 2000s, when fast resolution of simple issues was sufficient.  As is it distant from the “Quality 1.0 Era” of the mid-2000s, where customers increasingly wanted successful resolution of more complicated issues.

Yet these changes have largely happened under the noses of most service and support organizations, many of which have not transformed their organizations to align to the changes in issue complexity and customer expectations.  In reality, many organizations have been caught offguard by how quickly customer demands and expectations changed.

Which begs the question: What does the next era of service and support hold?  And how should we prepare for it?

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It is January 10, 2012, and hopefully by now you’ve been able to dig out of your inboxes.

To help you prepare for the year ahead, CCC’s research and advisory team is putting its heads together to give you some additional perspective on areas of opportunity we see across a variety of companies—fresh ideas on how to enhance the customer experience and improve operational performance.

The intent here is not to increase your workload, of course, but to give you additional perspective on continuing to improve your service and support operations in the year ahead.

So let me start here with the recommendation of a relatively simple tweak: Ensure that all staff know how to navigate your company’s website.

It is a basic idea, but conversations with numerous service and support organizations reveal that most companies—both B2C and B2B—have not properly taught staff to use their own websites.

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In a clever April Fool’s post earlier this year, a colleague joked about the rise of DIY (do it yourself) call centers.

As it turns out, the prophecy has somewhat come true.

In this case, though, it’s not people setting up their own DIY call centers, but instead service and support organizations increasingly catering to DIYers.

In an interesting recent Wall Street Journal article, vacuum cleaner, lawn mower, and snow blower companies all report that they have seen an uptick in call volume from customers who increasingly are self-troubleshooting but getting stuck mid-way and calling for help.

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A flurry of articles have been published on organizational design of late, highlighting the importance of it today and recommending related best practices.

Senior executives in the service and support organization must be heeding the messages from these articles, as we are seeing renewed interest in our research and benchmarking related to organizational design.

This is particularly true for B2B support organizations that we work with, many of which are now reassessing the way their function has operated and organized for years.

A number of reasons for the renewed interest exist, but the most frequently verbalized is this: Faced with the realization that the days of basic order entry by humans are nearing a close as more and more customers prefer to self-serve and operating budgets shrink, more B2B organizations are seeking to innovate and optimize the service and order management function.

Interesting to note, however is that B2B organizations aren’t merely considering role and title changes, but in some cases actually shaking up the entire order management function and reorganizing to align differently to the business.

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The latest trend in learning and development?  Incorporating videogame techniques into the workplace (i.e.,“gamification”) for training and other often menial tasks.

Companies like IBM, SAP, and Deloitte all have used gaming technology to better engage employees in training and data entry and make the tasks seem less tedious and more resonant.

What they have found is that winning virtual badges (indicating an advance to the next level) and interacting in entertaining landscapes and backgrounds (unsurprisingly) actually is far more engaging (for millennials and boomers) than sitting in a classroom for hours on end listening to someone.  And in some studies, videogames even yield better knowledge retention (some research finds that if learning is not put into action within 2 weeks, staff lose that knowledge).

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Medical billing in the U.S. is about to become even more complicated.

In a quest for more accurate medical and insurance diagnoses, the U.S. is in the process of expanding its number of medical billing codes from 18,000 to 140,000.

(Read about some of the hilarious new codes here, including “bitten by squirrel, initial encounter,” “burn due to water skis on fire, subsequent encounter,” and “bizarre personal appearance.”)

Of course the code change is well intended—it is meant to drive improved public health research—but the execution will surely be a nightmare, as any service and support executive knows.

In fact, the headache (not to mention increased cost due to additional administrative headcount) that the medical community will soon face is well known to service and support executives.  Challenges with “call categorization” (i.e., asking frontline staff to document the reason code for a customer conversation) have plagued the function for years.

Despite numerous efforts, service and support organizations simply have found that accurate reason codes are hard to come by—staff simply are unwilling to sift through pages of codes to find the perfect match to the customer issue.

Indeed, call categorization data accuracy has become so poor, that many organizations have drastically reduced the number of reason codes, favoring high level accuracy.  What these organizations have realized is that having a code for every possible call type does not really drive value for the business.  Instead, focusing on accuracy of tracking broader issues and trends is much more effective and actionable.

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In the world of B2B order fulfillment and technical support, nothing matters more than issue resolution and case closure.  Quite literally, time is money—both for customers and for the company.

Now there are many ways to optimize issue resolution and case closure, something CCC has researched extensively: measuring resolution more effectively, improving the knowledge base, and even revising staff incentives, among other strategies.  Admittedly, though, all of these are difficult to change and require investment to optimize.

But we recently surfaced an opportunity we believe most companies have overlooked.  The idea comes from a U.S. operations of a global manufacturing conglomerate, which recently decreased time to resolution 33% and improved issue resolution 26% over one month.  (Yes, you read that correctly.)

What the company realized is that it’s not that staff aren’t motivated to resolve issues, it’s that they don’t always know how to resolve issues.  And even with an effective knowledge base, sometimes it’s hard for staff to know where to start.

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There are many things about which B2B service and support organizations can be proud: order processing errors have decreased over the past several years, customers increasingly use self-service and self-help, and CRM utilization is up at many organizations.  With all of this progress, however, it is rare to find a B2B organization that is satisfied with its current level of frontline performance.

Certainly performance is adequate, if not quite decent.  But faced with mandates to decrease service and support costs while at the same time improve the customer experience, B2B service and support organizations are increasingly searching for the next opportunity to drive progress.

Which is why CCC’s latest research on frontline performance, The Next Frontier of Rep Performance, has resonated so well with B2B organizations, order management and technical support alike.

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Multi-channel investments remain a big focus for many service and support organizations as they balance changing customer needs and preferences and cost to serve.

But given limited investment resources, the question remains which channels should be prioritized.  Some colleagues recently discussed the value of social media as a channel, but here we want to discuss e-mail and chat specifically.  In question: If you had to choose just one, is e-mail or chat the better investment?

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They are one of those things that companies often love to hate: customer complaints.

Complaints are an added hassle, typically creating additional and time-consuming work, both for service and support and for other parts of the business.

So it is no wonder that for a long time, many organizations have minimized their attention to the efficacy of the complaint handling process.

The result of this?  Complaint policies that require customers to call a specific phone number, repeat their issue to multiple tiers of staff, submit a written report, and provide intricate evidence of an issue.  (These are all examples surfaced from companies we work with.)

Certainly all of these policies are well-intentioned, but they often signal to the customer that companies do not actually want to hear about the issue.

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