Six Potentially Great Customer Service Projects for 2010

The following is a projection on how the Customer Service industry could try to revolutionize itself (again) in 2010.

• Visualization. Providing a graphical representation of hard data is a well-proven way to spot patterns and relationships that lead to all kinds of helpful insights.  In customer service this could be used for analyzing Process Data, showing how incoming customer tickets are routed, worked-on and resolved between different teams and over time.  Another powerful application would be for use when researching for solutions, using graphical navigation to browse through the knowledgebase of content that’s bound together by its attribute values.
• Service Orientated Architecture. Taken from the software world, this is about offering small discrete services that are complementary to existing products and services.  Breaking out specialist activities as services, that can be offered in a semi-automated web-based way, has great potential. They provide immediate value to customers in specific situations, and is a great way to differentiate the service portfolio and get more cash flowing in (for a change).  With efficiency improvements in handling small payments, the pay-as-you-go services model could be expanded to offer all kinds of features that were not economical before.
• Problem Capture will hopefully finally come of age.  Millions of dollars (and hours) are wasted every year because customer problems are poorly understood by service providers.  Solving the right problem has always been a fundamental factor in running an efficient service centre, however its still not easy to capture the precise problem every time.  Technologies are starting to come to the rescue, finally.  Capturing video and photos to show problems is starting to become standard practice, and as network speeds and compression technologies catch up with the adoption rate it should become more feasible to “show” the problem to the service rep, avoiding any confusion.
• Knowledge Management.  As search technologies continue to rapidly evolve, the capture, storage and retrieval of expert knowledge will become a large part of the service work processes. Knowledge content formats will also continue to evolve from text to graphics, into video, and even into an Augmented Reality where systems seamlessly overlay additional (real-time) information on top of traditional views.
• Social Media.  Whilst in its early stages, new and innovative tools will evolve that allows anyone to share their thoughts and comments to friends or the world at large.  This will increasingly be done in real-time, as all mobile devices will offer immediate capture and sharing of information (visual and textual).  I suspect the major advances will be in filtering the noise, so that reliable (or at least like-minded) sources of information are better publicized and easier to find (less trail-and-error).
• Team Work. More and more collaborative systems are appearing every month (e.g. Google Wave) and the standard model of each problem being assigned to one customer service rep is potentially set to change.  Each service rep should be able to have their own area of expertise published, and that expertise be invoked (or scheduled) as-and-when it is needed. Getting the best person for every task should raise the bar on service standards, although without some simplification and clear management it could end up a confused mess where the most-able are constantly overloaded.

All I can say is good luck, and hopefully the same list will not appear at the end of next year.