Printable versionWhat is on the horizon for customer service?
What are the opportunities for service and support organizations to increase their value to the customers, to employees and the company over the next three to five years?
Using scenario based planning, The Support Futures team has developed a framework to think about some of the possible future states of the industry and the implications for service capabilities and offerings. The team has identified a number of drivers and boiled them down to two major dimensions. One dimension deals with the structure of the industry and the companies that make it up, and the other deals with the value proposition of what is being offered.
The horizontal axis, Silos to Communities, represents the potential movement of the industry from hierarchical, command and control, impermeable organizational structures (traditional) to organizations that are more like a network which is dynamic, self-organizing and self-regulating. The movement along the vertical axis represents a shift from selling product and technology features and functionality to selling solutions to customers' business problems. These axes or trends are largely independent and the industry's movement along either axis will have a profound impact on the nature of the service offerings.
Using this framework, the team developed scenarios for each of the quadrants. These stories help people relate to what the futures states might be like and they become the basis for conversations about the implications of each of the four quadrants. This helps organizations identify and develop strategies that they will need to consider in the future.
The team is currently developing a kit for member companies to use to host strategic conversations within their companies and monitoring and updating the drivers.