Over the last few decades, we have almost completely been “weaned away” from human interaction in pre-sales customer service – whether we’re buying branded stuff with the click of a button, or using a try and buy concept for pants in a department store or software in the cloud! In fact, we often prefer this relaxed self service approach compared to the pressure of dealing with sales persons! Besides, with product information widely available through the collective curation, rating & reviews of the all-mighty “consumers” – the poor sales guy has a hard time competing & adding value!
But post sales service (customer support) remains a completely different ballgame – how is that, you might ask? While the number of jobs for million dollar quota carrying enterprise salespersons, for instance, continues to decline year over year – the number of folks employed (in the US) for helping customers resolve problems with their products is projected to grow from 2.2 million in 2010 to 2.5 million in 2020.
Whenever there is such expansion of labour pool – it creates an opportunity for technologies to evolve that are driven by increasing efficiency – but more often than not, completely change the way entire industries operate. When was the last time you stood in line at a bank to get cash?
Over the next few weeks and months we’ll explore this opportunity further – share our insights into customer behaviors, evolving technologies, customer successes & our vision! Do you believe we’re ready for tsunami of change? What are interesting models that you think will emerge? We hope you will participate by contributing your experience, thoughts, opinions, & knowledge.
To join this dialogue – please participate via twitter at yonyxtweets (use #yonyx #customer with your posts), or Facebook or LinkedIn or GooglePlus. We’ll include a summary of your opinions in our future posts as well.
