Service and the new front office
The traditional front office functions are gone, upended by empowered “connected customers” with increased expectations. To deliver, the service function must evolve from its reactionary role into an anticipatory one, enabled by predictive analytics and new capabilities to create a proactive readiness in a connected enterprise.
This approach calls for data harvesting to provide granular insights from customer channels and purchase interactions to identify service vulnerabilities before they rebound as inbound complaints. Future-state metrics may even look to measure incidents avoided rather than incidents resolved.
Traditional customer service wastes resources, time and money by reacting to concerns rather than anticipating them. Customer service needs to move beyond the “call center” operations of the past to a virtual ecosystem of digital and human assistants. It’s happening already: by 2021, 15 percent of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by artificial intelligence—an increase of 400 percent from 2017, according to Gartner.
To meet the increased expectations of the connected customer, customer service must:
- offer a seamless integration between self-service and live service
- have agents who know their customers and the skills to fix their problems and solve for their needs
- excel at proactive service as customer expectations continue to rise.
Companies that focus on these touchpoints to provide more relevant and agile customer service will be the ones that differentiate themselves the most from competitors.
Deliver customer-first service
The future of customer service is here. It’s personalized, automated, empowering and predictive.
Be future-ready
Changes in the front office will lead the journey into the future for most companies. It’s here, after all, that the enterprise meets the marketplace and the connected customer. To embrace a new front-office structure, marketing, sales and service executives will need new processes, policies, capabilities and skills that address the six must-haves: data, analytics, automation, organizational structure, metrics and culture.
Leaders don’t wait to be disrupted; they prepare for the future with preemptive disruption of their own. Contact us today to find out how KPMG helps enterprises create better customer experiences and be ready for the future of the front office.
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