Rick DeLisi - Digital Customer Service

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: DeLisi, Rick, author. | Michaeli, Dan, author.

Title: Digital customer service : transforming customer experience for an on-screen world / Rick DeLisi, Dan Michaeli.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2021] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021024441 (print) | LCCN 2021024442 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119841906 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119842071 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119842064 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Customer services.

Classification: LCC HF5415.5 .D445 2021 (print) | LCC HF5415.5 (ebook) | DDC 658.8/12—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024441

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024442

Cover Design and Image: © Glia Technologies Inc.

To “The Customer”:As you have transformed to a digital-first lifestyle, may all your Service experiences be transformed as well .

RICK DELISI has been researching customer service and customer experience for the past two decades. He is the co-author of the best-selling book The Effortless Experience , and has written several pieces that have been published in the Harvard Business Review . Prior to working in customer service research, he was a journalist, winning four Associated Press awards for outstanding feature reporting.

DAN MICHAELI is CEO and co-founder of Glia, the New York–based technology company that has become an industry leader in Digital Customer Service. The Glia platform helps businesses reinvent how they support customers in a digital world. He is an award-winning speaker who has been a contributor to numerous publications, including Forbes .

You could say that customer service runs in my blood. My mother started her career working in the American Airlines reservation center, moving her way up through the organization before continuing on to lead customer service operations and consulting teams at companies like EDS and AT Kearney.

My first job in high school was as a telemarketer, calling people just as they sat down for dinner to ask if they wanted to subscribe to HBO (they loved me). My first job out of college was with a major US contact center outsourcer, and I've been in customer experience and contact center consulting for the last 20+ years.

Over this time, I've watched as contact center technology and operations evolved slowly and iteratively, focusing on incremental changes to minimize handle time and reduce the cost per minute of live interactions. But the rate of change has accelerated dramatically in the last six to seven years, and companies have struggled to keep up as:

New interaction channels were added, requiring new investments and increasing the complexity, cost, and fragmentation of customer service operations

New vendors entered the space, challenging legacy providers to “up their game” by investing in new features and functionalities to stay competitive

Customers increasingly compared their experiences across companies – including new digital disruptors like Amazon and Zappos – raising the collective bar for all companies and industries

Enter Digital Customer Service (DCS). But what does that mean, exactly? If you asked five customer experience leaders what DCS is, you'd get five different answers and five very different approaches to how they are achieving this (or hoping to achieve this) within their companies.

DCS isn't about channel proliferation and ensuring your company can interact with customers in any digital channel of their choice. It isn't about enabling customers to do everything via online or mobile self-service. And it isn't about using bots to automate every customer interaction under the sun.

While more and more customer issues are handled (or could be handled) using self-service or some form of automation, there will always be a need for customers to be able to interact with a human to get the more complex and more emotive issues resolved. We call these moments of truth – they are the customer episodes/journeys/intents (pick your term) that have the potential to create a promoter or a detractor based on how they are handled. These are the interactions that present a rare opportunity to deepen and expand the relationship with the customer.

DCS is about how to transform these “moments of truth” from our phone-first, analog past into a future where we leverage the digital devices that have become the omnipresent centerpiece of all of our lives, bringing a new layer of richness and depth to customer interactions.

DCS is about truly “meeting customers where they are” by leveraging the digital entry points that customers tend to use and enhancing the interaction from there in a way that feels seamless, easy, and even delightful to customers.

Companies have been talking about seamless omnichannel experiences for years, yet few have actually achieved this aspiration, even for one-off episodes. Why is that? At the core, it's tied to the operating model of the company – namely that the digital and contact center functions tend to report up through different parts of the organization and often have competing (and sometimes even conflicting) priorities.

Until companies view their own internal processes through the lens of the way customers live their lives today, this will continue to be a challenge and a barrier to providing a truly effortless and seamless customer experience.

Digital Customer Service is for any leader who aspires to integrate digital and contact center strategies in order to take customer experience to the next level.

This book is a helpful tool for:

Establishing a clear and common language for what Digital Customer Service is and its associated component parts

Sizing the benefits of DCS for the company, the customer, and the frontline employee

Developing a plan to make DCS a reality based on the pillars of an effective DCS transformation

I am personally very excited about the next phase in the evolution of customer service and how companies can transform their existing digital and customer service operations to make things better for everyone involved. This book is a meaningful step in that direction and will set the foundation for what great Digital Customer Service can and should look like.