It was Albert Einstein who said “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”.
And true enough, we live today in an era of disruption, a world where new ways of thinking are re-inventing markets and providing exciting new solutions to old problems.
New market forces are re-inventing their relevant spaces. Familiar companies, such as Uber, Airbnb and LendingClub (a leading social lending company) are just a few examples.
One of the forces that is driving this trend is the rise of a new breed of customers - The NOW customers.
Forrester are calling is era as the age of the customer.
Are you ready for the Millennials?
The Millennial segment, currently defined as those between age 18 and 34, make up 25% of the population.
Millennials will soon be entering peak earning and spending years, and they have very high expectations from services providers about the type of customer service they receive, how and when it should be delivered to them.
All this is creating a shift in what matters for consumers – brand loyalty, especially for large traditional consumer institutions, is often replaced with suspicion and mistrust. We’re seeing a rise in importance of a mix of old and new values: “transparency”, "value for money", "saving" and "stability“, family, friends, home, environment and local communities.
“I use self-service in McDonalds so that I don’t have to talk to anyone or take off my headphones.”
OMNI Channnel is no longer an option - it's a MUST
98% of today’s consumers are omnichannel users, taking advantage, on average, of 6-7 different channels to connect with organizations. The digital revolution is creating consumers that are much more connected, knowledgeable and have more power than ever before.
However, when customers fail to achieve what they wanted on a specific channel they favorite escalation channel is voice calls the contact center to speak with a live rep.
These customers are calling the contact center expecting the agent to solve the problem they couldn’t solve on the previous channel.
From self-service to selfie-service
The combination of the three elements of personalization, self-service and social consumption creates a phenomenon that Telesperience has dubbed ‘selfie-service’. This represents an evolution of self-service because it doesn’t just enable a customer to serve themselves, but also to create their own service paradigm, tailor their experience, and be more creative. It embraces the concept that the customer wants more control and may wish to support, recommend, interact or otherwise document their experiences. In selfie-service, co-creation becomes the norm and an emerging but fundamental need is addressed - the wish of the customer to be in total control of the experience, in order to build, appraise and innovate it.
The employee landscape is changing as well.
Millennials are quickly becoming a large part of the customer service workforce. Recent reports show that over a third of our workforce is millennial based (and in some organizations even more than that). But other workforce generations are adopting millennial behaviors and expectations as well.
Millennials bring with them to the workforce expectations that are similar to the ones they exhibit as consumers:
- A sense of purpose and loyalty driven by the perception of the brand.
- Transparency into the processes and being empowered to impact it - millennials need to feel they have a voice within the organization.
- Personalized recognition in their skills and capabilities as an individual - Millennials want meaningful interactions in the workplace, and expect real-time feedback on their actions (annual performance reviews are not good enough) and immediate support for their professional needs.
- Flexibility through innovation – technically advanced systems that are easy to use and can be adapted to their needs to help them maintain their work-life balance.
So should service providers prepare themselves for this revolution?
Well, this is where NICE comes in to the picture. We believe it’s time to RE-INVENT CUSTOMER SERVICE!
So what does re-inventing customer service really mean?
First, it means new ways of creating omnichannel interactions that deliver smart, highly personalized, connections between customers and employees, across all touchpoints…
And new ways of understanding customers and their journeys, acting on and predicting their next action.
Second, it means new ways of engaging employees and optimizing our workforce, driving motivation and adapting to our workforce needs, both customer-facing and in our back office…using advanced Analytics to generate insight, take action and predict intent, with a state-of-the-art process Automation that creates a new standard of efficiency…
And last, doing all this both on-premises and in the Cloud.
To learn more on how NICE is reinventing customer service, check out our web site.
And last, one can't end this post, without a tribute to the legendary Tracy Chapman - Talkin' bout a Revolution