The Future of Customer Service

A Forward-Looking Playbook for Customer Service Leaders

and Their Teams

1
 The Future of Customer Service

5 Trends Will Transform

lue-Focused
ive, Va S er
dict vic
Pre e

Customer Service
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n fe r r ack 1. D
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5
Forward-looking customer service and support (CSS) organizations are shifting
from a reactive strategy designed to limit costs to a predictive strategy that Direct
Resolving
delivers additional value to customers. Customer
Issues
Feedback
Five trends will drive this transformation and expand the scope, impact and

4. Service in Third-P
responsibilities of service.

Experiences
Customer
Service and
Service in
Consider these changes: Company
Support’s Personalized
Scope Experiences
Channels
CSS
 will deliver personalized experiences while also balancing increased

-Led
customer privacy concerns.
Customer-

acy
 SS will respond to requests from machine and connected devices in
C

art
Initiated
addition to human customers.

riv
Service

Ch

P
 ustomers will look beyond company-owned channels, using service
C

2.
an
ls

ne
information from third-party sources and websites to resolve their issues.

3. Ma ce
This guide helps CSS leaders adjust their strategies and investments to build ch ine-Initiated Servi
toward a compelling vision for the future.

Source: Gartner

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 The Future of Customer Service

Become a Value-Driven Function

What’s happening? Strategic Planning Assumption

A recent Gartner survey finds that the most common priority for service and support leaders in 2022 is
“growing the business.” To do this, leaders must reach beyond the first-contact issue resolution mission of today By 2025, 40% of
to redefine the strategy, processes and technology to equip teams to generate revenue and drive retention. customer service and
support functions will
40% use value enhancement
as a primary way to
What to do about it measure the function’s
success, up from 17%
Enable reps to deliver value to customers: in 2021.
• Deploy real-time conversational analytics to ensure reps guide conversations Source: Gartner

to enhance customer value.

Leverage a zero-based budgeting approach:

• Reevaluate current service investments based on how much they improve
customer and organizational value.

Shift how the function tracks and measures success:

• Move away from traditional measures of customer satisfaction to a Value
Enhancement Score.

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 The Future of Customer Service

Balance Personalization With Privacy

What’s happening? Strategic Planning Assumption

Seventy-one percent of B2C customers and 86% of B2B customers expect customer service to be well informed
about them. At the same time, customers are increasingly concerned about how their personal data is used. The By 2025, 75% of the
inherent tension between personalized experiences and personal privacy will increase, complicating efforts to world’s population
deliver relevant service in a context of customer trust. will have its personal
75% information covered
by modern privacy
What to do about it regulations.

Prioritize transparency in customer privacy settings:

• Inform customers about the personal information you use, why you’re using it and how
they can manage it.

Make ethics a core component of your data management strategy:

• Create data use cases based on how they benefit the customer, not just the company.

Collect the minimum data required through the least invasive methods:
• Limit data collection to what the organization needs to deliver timely resolution and
added value.

Give customers better control over how their data is used:

• Clearly delineate consent management and preference settings by functional area and
use case to avoid conflating uses of data.

4
 The Future of Customer Service

Account for Machine Customers

What’s happening? Strategic Planning Assumption

Customers are becoming increasingly comfortable with virtual personal assistants (VPAs), and products are
becoming increasingly intelligent. Advances in conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things
By 2025, 37% of
(IoT) will enable these products and VPAs to evolve into machine customers who act on behalf of their owners,
customers will try using
resetting expectations about what constitutes a low-effort experience.
37% a digital assistant to
interact with customer
service on their behalf.
What to do about it

Prepare for machine-customer-initiating inquiries:

• Catalog the use cases where machines could make inquiries on behalf of a
human customer.
• Create objective auto-responses to simple inquiry use cases that would satisfy
machine customers but also build a feedback loop to human counterparts.

Understand how the customer experience (CX) needs of machine customers differ from those
of human customers:
• Collaborate with CX teams to develop machine-centric personas and journey maps.

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 The Future of Customer Service

Prepare for Expanded Paths to Resolution

What’s happening? Strategic Planning Assumption
Customers continue to use and trust unofficial sources of information to address service issues. Think: Reddit,
YouTube, etc. This erodes control over customer experiences, yet could also help customers access trustworthy By 2025, 60% of
peer-to-peer support. customers will seek
service in third-party
What to do about it 60% sources of information
not owned by the
company.
Identify sources of information about your products and services:
• Manually review known sources and use social media listening tools and search analytics to
identify unknown sources.
• Evaluate both the quality of the information and its impact on the customer journey.

Determine why your customers visit third-party sources, to optimize company-owned resources:
• Gather natural customer language from search terms and third-party materials.
• Use this language to optimize company-owned channels, resources and search engine optimization.

Update internal knowledge management to educate reps:

• Tell customer service reps about the third-party channels customers use and the information
they find there, and develop a plan to address the perceptions customers may bring to service
interactions based on third-party experiences.

Partner with internal stakeholders:

• Work with legal, communications, marketing, product and sales to evaluate the opportunities
and risks of linking to or integrating third-party content on company-owned channels.

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 The Future of Customer Service

Fully Capture the Voice of the Customer

What’s happening? Strategic Planning Assumption

Service and support leaders are heavily investing in emerging voice of the customer (VoC) technologies to
complement traditional, but not comprehensive, survey-based feedback. These new VoC data collection methods By 2025, 60% of
deliver timely, actionable insights to improve service interactions in a way that requires little to no customer effort. service organizations
will adopt analytics

What to do about it
60% technologies to
supplement traditional
surveys by analyzing
Mitigate VoC adoption challenges: voice and text
• Iteratively implement new VoC technologies. interactions with
customers.
• Hire (or develop) staff with the data analytics skills needed to leverage new VoC technologies.

Do not abandon surveys completely:

• Use surveys to answer important questions that are hard to infer, like which aspects of the
service experience matter most to customers.

Establish a closed-loop process to act on insights:

• Identify representatives from service, product teams, IT, data, operations, and sales and
marketing who will have oversight over the entire VoC life cycle and can take timely action in
response to insights.

Create visibility across the organization:

• Use newsletters and other communications/media to promote your VoC strategy and its results.

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 The Future of Customer Service

The Value-Focused CSS Organization Is Coming.

Are You Ready?
In a few years, best-in-class service organizations will be delivering not only better customer service experiences
but also different experiences, with radical flexibility around:

Where service happens — often outside Who initiates service — increasingly

of company service channels machines, not human customers

When service happens — before the Why service happens — to help the
customer even knows there is a problem customer get more out of the product

These changes will transform CSS and the roles and responsibilities of its leaders. Use this guide to stay ahead of the curve
and develop your strategy for building the service and support organization of the future.

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 The Future of Customer Service

How Gartner Helps CSS Leaders Adapt

and Stay Ahead
Drive market-leading growth in today’s changing landscape by delivering high-quality service experiences built around
a customer-centric strategy. We’ll help you do it.

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How Gartner supports you as a client

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maturity with diagnostic enhancement strategy to Service & Support Score, a
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and loyalty. function using objective,
Review your existing customer peer-based performance
service strategy with a Leverage the Gartner one-page standards.
Gartner expert to identify strategic planning template to
areas of optimization and define program objectives that
improvement. will lead to success.

9
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