Trend to Watch – and Address – for 2024 Strategic Planning

In October, we hosted a customer service webinar that brought in several hundred registrants from a wide variety of organizations comprised mainly of managers, directors, VPs and senior leadership. To prepare for our session, we took the opportunity to pose a few questions during the registration process to better understand our registrant group’s focus areas for their self-service channels and how important they felt AI-driven self-service would be to their support strategy over the next 1 to 3 years. Today, I’m going to explore the responses around the self-service focus areas and why they shed light on a trend your organization can’t ignore.

Focus Areas for Self-Service

We asked our audience to identify which of the following would be their main focus area for self-service in the next 1 year and the next 2-3 years. The results:

• Over the next year (2024), 59% of total respondents said that their focus would be on balancing savings with customer satisfaction,
• 28% reported they would focus on reducing the cost to serve, and
• 13% saying that they would focus only on a great customer experience.

This profile changed somewhat in 2-3 years, where:

• 69% of total respondents said that their focus would be on balancing savings with customer satisfaction,
• 23% reported they would focus on reducing the cost to serve, and
• Just 8% saying that they would focus only on a great customer experience. 

The focus on balancing both cost savings and customer satisfaction is somewhat expected as the essence of being a customer service leader is to walk the razor’s edge between providing good or great service while keeping costs as low as possible.  

The Real Surprise

While the focus of most respondents was not a surprise, the level of discontinuity within each company around what they considered the focus to be was quite interesting. When sharing their focus over the next year, only 19% of the organizations asked had a unanimous perspective on what they wanted to achieve with their self-service application. For years 2 to 3, the discontinuity was even more profound as only 14% of the companies with multiple participants reported the same priorities. 

What makes these numbers even more interesting is that our audience was comprised of people within the customer service infrastructure at their organization who were joining a webinar focused on maximizing self-service without sacrificing customer satisfaction. For this reason, we’d expect to draw a crowd of executives at the helm of service organizations committed to this goal, but that was not necessarily the case. In over 40% of the cases of disconnect within an organization’s responses, the person with the most senior role actually broke from the majority of opinions and picked a “reduce cost to serve” focus over the other two options.   

Why This is a Trend to Address

Misalignment of internal goals is certainly not a new concept, but with rapid changes in customer expectations, technological advancements, and employee engagement impacting nearly every organization, it is critical to ensure operational units are working towards the same vision and goals. If your company has divergent opinions on something as critical as what the self-service channels should accomplish for the organization, that needs to be addressed.

To start, we recommend that an organization’s leadership help the rest of the company understand not only what they are really trying to accomplish, but also how their role fits into this mission so that they can execute on the strategy more effectively and help achieve intended outcomes. This cannot be communicated once at a yearly kick off meeting. Once you identify your focus and what you are looking to accomplish, that vision needs to be clearly and consistently communicated so that every person within every department understands and is focused on executing the same goals. We see this when we look at top performing customer service organizations: they have a clear vision of what the organization is trying to accomplish, with clear goals and objectives that are consistently communicated, and they ensure buy-in by tying compensations, incentives, and recognition to achieving those goals.

(For the record, and based on analysis explained in the October webinar, J.D. Power believes that the focus area for self-service channels should be on balancing savings and customer satisfaction.)

If you are challenged with understanding team alignment, getting your team focused on shared customer service goals for 2024, or are looking to set goals based on what your customers want your service experience to be, connect with our self-service experts today. 

About the Author: Mark Miller leads the J.D. Power Global Customer Service Advisory practice and is responsible for thought leadership, solutions development, strategic alliances and client support. He leads customer service, technical support and sales performance improvement and certification initiatives for the company.

Where to find more insights like this:
This blog post was featured in the Customer Service Advice & Insights monthly newsletter. Make sure you're signed up to get the latest customer service channel intelligence >