Customer service
transformation:
Six key challenges 

In the last few years, many businesses have had to rapidly evolve into digitally-driven organizations to increase their agility and better serve customers. IDC forecasts digital transformation technology investment to be $2.8 trillion in 2025, more than double the amount allocated in 2020.¹

But the headlines about transformation often don't capture how hard it is, or the roadblocks faced along the way. Customer service transformation requires the right vision, organizational buy-in, effective communication and change management—and modern collaboration tools that can automate and bring more efficiency to employees' work.

If your organization is about to embark on its own customer service transformation, here are six common challenges to look out for and how to address them.

Setting the right strategic vision is one of the major challenges companies face when transforming customer service. Deloitte research shows the importance of customer experience in building trust and brand loyalty. After product quality and cost, the most important factors for building trust for customers were fixing issues in a timely manner and helpful employees.

Therefore, before executing any change, leaders need to pinpoint their companies' "why" for customer service transformation—ideally something more than a need to keep up with competitors. Here are some important questions that can help shape your customer service vision:

• What are your organization's unique customer service challenges and inefficiencies, and how do they hurt the customer experience?
• Do you have any roadblocks or bottlenecks keeping employees' from better serving customers?
• Can you draw any insights from your company's customer service data, such as call times, wait times, and customer retention and satisfaction metrics? This data may be able to show where there's room for improvement.

No organization has unlimited resources, which means every company has to carefully set its priorities when transforming customer service.

Transformation is a destination, not a journey. It often happens in stages, so you'll need to decide what initiatives to tackle first with the budget and resources you have. This could mean initially investing in new contact center technologies, creating a digital center of excellence to standardize and execute your strategy, or hiring specific roles, such as a chief digital officer to spearhead your transformation.

You must identify what moves will be most impactful to advance your transformation and what financial and staffing resources you can dedicate to these initiatives to begin transforming your customer experience.

Rather than looking from the inside out, you can find value by starting from the outside in and putting customers at the center of everything you do. This starts at the top with leaders setting a clearly defined and communicated strategic vision for customer service transformation. It also requires awareness about who your customers are, what their unique needs are and how your business can solve their specific challenges.

In some cases, you may even have to shift key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure you're incentivizing the right things and sending a clear message about how your organization defines success. For example, you may decide to create new customer service benchmarks, like how often customers' issues are resolved during their first call, to measure your organization's progress.

Whatever approach you take, you must align the right metrics and measurements to drive the outcomes you want to achieve.

Companies need to make the right technology investments when transforming customer service. Though technology implementation will vary by organization, at a foundational level, most companies can benefit from core capabilities such as automation, data integration and interoperability.

A combination of collaboration and contact center solutions can ease the transition to a new way of doing business and streamline employees' work with the right tools to help improve employee and customer experiences. Virtual, cloud-based contact center solutions and services can support virtually anywhere-anytime productivity for call center agents by allowing them to take calls either in the center or remotely from a branch office or from home. These solutions also provide data that can give you more visibility into your customer experience and enable you to identify areas for continuous improvement.

Cloud-based unified and collaboration tools can also boost your company's agility by facilitating multichannel and omnichannel customer communications—whether through chat or instant messaging, online or phone. These tools also allow you to easily scale your resources in response to changes in customer demand, giving you more flexibility to adapt to changing customer needs and ensuring employees always have the necessary resources to effectively serve customers.