Smarter Services delivers insights

The Service Council hosted the 4th edition of our Smarter Services Symposium in San Diego in March, featuring presentations led by organisations such as Zappos, HP, Safelite Autoglass, KONE Elevator, Ingersoll-Rand, Xerox, Vivint and more. We were fortunate to welcome senior executives from the San Francisco Giants and the San Diego Padres to share perspectives on service as it ties to the fan experience in hospitality and sports.

There was so much important information shared over the three days, which we are making available through a library of resources available from www.servicecouncil.com/symposium2015, and following is my attempt to summarise the top five takeaways.

1. A talent challenge awaits - We’ve documented the mounting challenge when it comes to a retiring service workforce. 70% of organisations are expecting an exodus of workers due to retirement in the next 10 years. While increasing efficiency and investment in automation may eliminate some service-related vacancies on the front-lines, there will still be a major shortage felt in supporting service demand. In addition, organisations are changing the hiring and training protocols of their front-line service agents to focus on broader customer management. We also hear a lot from organisations around the redistribution of skilled workers to higher-level support functions to assist front-line agents and customers in times of service recovery.

2. A crisis of information - Organisations have spent a lot of time over the last three to five years building listening platforms. These range from Voice of Customer (VoC) initiatives, social media investments or even remote monitoring. While companies have become very good at gathering information, very few have been able to consistently drive insight from that data. The areas of analytics and business intelligence will continue to see a surge in investment, both as it relates to technology solutions as well as the search for talent.

3. Customer value communication is a major struggle - The Internet of Things (IoT) and remote monitoring was a consistent theme of discussion across the event. Organisations that have invested in IoT have seen tremendous returns in terms of service business results. Yet, these haven’t necessarily translated into better customer results and increased customer loyalty scores. The issue is that while IoT enables predictive service and/or more effective reactive service, it reduces the visibility of the service organisation in the eyes of the customer. It presents a communication challenge to servicing organisations to continue to make customers aware of the value presented in a service relationship. Does this value take the form of loss aversion, higher service performance or customised offerings? That’s yet to be determined as different customers align with different messages.

4. Collaboration: a long way to go - There is still a basic lack of process in linking service with other business groups. While there is maturity in linking service and sales to promote revenue opportunities, there is a big gap in connecting service with IT, product design, engineering and marketing. The first step to enhancing collaboration is in building a process that links various groups. The next step is to build alignment tied to the customers’ needs and the third is to use data as the grounds of collaboration.

5. Service and customer experience design is an underappreciated discipline - Organisations have gone back to the drawing board to build new services for customer value and revenue generation. Yet, very few actually take a further step back and re-evaluate the design of their service offerings and, more importantly, the design of the experience that their customers go through when seeking service or information. Design is an underappreciated discipline, one that can really help maximise effectiveness.

We’re at an interesting juncture in the transformation of service organisations. Leaders are looking to find the appropriate mix between automation with human interaction, self-service with assisted service, customer satisfaction with profitability. These are all themes that we will look to dive into over the coming year of research and collaboration.

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