Rick DeLisi - Digital Customer Service

REALITY: Digital transformation is surprisingly not hard, and there's a rock-solid ROI business case to be made for why now is the time to take action.

When is it going to be our turn to transform? The answer is: Right now, if you choose.

We've been studying the science of customer service for the past two decades, and what we've been learning and observing is VERY exciting:

Rick DeLisi has been researching the psychology of customer behavior and expectations in service for the past two decades, and is the co-author of the best-selling book The Effortless Experience.

Dan Michaeli has devoted his career to developing solutions that create world-class digital customer experiences for “traditional” non-digital-native organizations. He is the CEO of New York–based Glia, a leader in helping companies reinvent how they serve their customers.

We collaborated together to explore how technology and psychology can work in concert to help companies achieve true digital transformation of their customer experience.

If any part of your job includes responsibility over the interactions customers are having with your company every day – whether you are a C-suite executive, a leader in customer service, customer experience, marketing, sales, or digital operations – this book will be immediately helpful. We will arm you with new strategic ideas as well as practical “things you can do” to increase your confidence that you can achieve this transformation and reap the rewards it will bring to your organization.

Our greatest hope is that the ideas we'll explore together in the pages to follow will benefit you in a personal way – both in your increasingly digital career and in your increasingly digital life. We're proud to show you what we've been learning, and are grateful you're here to share it with.

—RD and DM

All illustrations and diagrams are original works by the Glia Creative team .

1 1. Craig Lee, “Screen Zombies: Average Person Will Spend 44 Hours Looking at Devices – and That's before Covid!” Study Finds (December 26, 2020), https://www.studyfinds.org/screen-zombies-average-person-spends-44-years-looking-at-devices/#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%20%E2%80%94%20As%20millions%20of,some%20kind%20of%20digital%20screen.

This book is divided into seven chapters that fit into three major sections.

In this first section, we will begin with a frank examination of why customer service as practiced at most companies isn't as successful as it ought to be (and why that isn't anyone's fault!), but more importantly, what you can do about it. These first three chapters are the leadoff leg of the book and have been designed to get things off to a fast start.

In Chapter 1, we will describe the “right now” opportunity for every company that is willing to rethink the way they serve their customers. The overall reputation of customer service is at an acute inflection point that will likely make or break the future success of many companies. But what we've discovered is a strategy – one that can be employed by any company – that appears to be creating an extraordinary confluence of positive results.

In Chapter 2, we will uncover how customer service as a collective discipline has gotten to where it is today, by tracing the evolution of our profession, starting from the days of the first call centers in the 1980s. If you've been around for a few decades, this chapter will take you back to some places you probably haven't thought about for a while. If you're a little newer to the field, it will feel like a trip to the customer service wing of the Smithsonian.

In Chapter 3, we will describe why digital self-service has become both the biggest opportunity and the biggest obstacle for the service profession. This is not a chapter about technology, but rather, about psychology. When you understand more about why customers behave the way they do when they're engaging in digital self-service (and how they feel about their interactions afterward ), the necessity for digitally transforming service will become crystal clear.

What we'll share in this chapter:

Customer service is experiencing a unique moment of opportunity. While the partial “digitization” of customer service may have sufficed in the past, now is the optimal time to take the final steps toward true digital transformation.

Companies that are transforming customer service into an experience that takes place entirely on a customer's screen are reporting their service operations have become much more economically efficient, while they are also achieving greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Those executives and leaders who are spearheading this transformation at their companies are recognizing an array of benefits – including making their jobs easier and more rewarding.

Over the past few decades, the perception of customer service has experienced a repeating pattern of ups and downs. Throughout the next few chapters, we'll trace the evolution of the prevailing perceptionof the service industry (almost like looking in the mirror) as it has changedseveral times over the past few decades – starting from the days of the first-ever call centers in the 1980s, all the way to today's digital world.

In an industry that has experienced two major peaks and two corresponding valleys – each about a decade apart – you'll see evidence that the next few years will result in either an unprecedented upward spike or yet another downward plunge. We are at an acute inflection point.

The choices you and your organization make right now about the digital transformation of customer service will define your future success (or failure) in the years to come.

When call centers were first introduced in the 1980s, the idea of enabling customers to call companies directly on the phone was considered new and exciting. The experience was generally excellent. But over time, as companies put more pressure on Service to cut costs, the experience of phone service began to suffer, causing the first dip.

Then, once customers got used to self-service, the experience improved and the curve rose again. But over time, as customers began to expect everything to be digital – and effortless – what they realized is that too many service experiences were still disconnected from their digital experiences, forcing them to restart their journey on the phone. And the phone reps they were speaking to weren't connected in any way to the digital experience customers were having on their own screens.

This mismatch resulted in disjointed “seamful” experiences that caused the second major dip.

Therefore, we are at an inflection point right now . If customer service embraces a full and complete digital transformation it is well within our power to rise to new heights, well beyond what we have ever accomplished before. Or, if not, to plummet once again, as we have twice before. The choice is yours, and the time to decide is now.

Based on the experiences of those companies that are now going all in, the key beneficiaries are … everyone: