Is customer support able to keep up?

Written by Wouter Verburg – Innovation Manager, Creative Spirit, Young guns mentor, will Innovate your Business & Team

Let’s be clear about it – I am an Industrial Design Engineer by heart. Satisfying customer needs by successfully combining technology and human skillsets in value chains and just loving the end-user. I have worked over 12 years in Industrial Design Engineering and the last 10 years I gathered field experience in the IT sector.

It has been catching my eye for a while and looking into it for at least the last five years. Today I was just struck in awe by a helpdesk response and I just realised…

In this era it must be a nightmare to be customer support or product support.

Why?

The corporate and private environment are blending into a mixture of multiple integrated value chains supported by a colourful mix of technology platforms…

Technology hosted by internal colleagues & departments, external suppliers and end-users themselves, while procedures can easiliy be outdated at implementation.

Join me in taking a step back and let’s have a broader perspective at everyday business as usual:

• Integrated value chains to provide a complete customer journey;
• Virtualised environments to be sufficiently agile;
• Customer satisfaction covered by the right Service Level Agreements;
• Mitigating Business Risk and meeting privacy regulations;
• Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to facilitate employees and reduce device investments;
• Social media customer interaction;
• Resulting in multiple access routes – enterprise network, web browsers, mobile device apps;
• With end users being anything from well informed, tech savvy – or completely not;
• And the End user’s world rotates around their smartphones and;
• We all expect instant gratification.

Multiskilled

The skillset of a successful customer support employee nowadays needs to be a complete blend of empathy for the end user’s perspective, Q&A skills, listening and proper translation, analytical skills and conceptual thinking. All is required to be able to connect the dots.

Is your team up to speed? Is your team diverse and eager enough?

Not to overcomplicate things I have left out Internet of Things, Robotics, AI and Guaranteed Basic Income. Be aware that these dimensions will be knocking at your door within the next 5 years, if not sooner.

…don´t be caught by surprise, be curious, make a plan and work on it!