To get things started here at my ActiveAnalysis blog, I am posting a slightly edited version of a recent post from my Genesys blog (you can find the original at www.betterinteractions.com , under the heading "Thinking Foreword").  In general, I will not double post, and I encourage checking out Better Interactions -- my blog and Rob Winder's are not very Genesys-specific (mine basically not at all!). 

Today I find myself with the distinct privilege of being in the middle of something quite remarkable that I think could be as big as the Internet, in terms of economic and societal impact.  I am speaking of the coming (r)evolution in customer service, which is the return of quality, really personal, pleasant quality, to customer service provided by successful enterprises, great and small, on a global scale.

When I say personal, I do not refer to personalized portals where I can serve myself in a milieu that seems to match my preferences.  I refer to people serving other people in commercial situations, and both enjoying the process.  I refer to companies actually doing what is often written about -- putting the customer first, inverting the pyramid, becoming customer-centric, turning contact centers from cost centers to profit centers, engaging customers and employees, and so on.  There is something deeply disruptive about this, if you think it through.  Our modern world of managerial capitalism* is based on a fairly draconian abstraction about the meaning of the firm.  The firm exists to "create value" by producing something that can be sold to consumers.  The focus of the firm is generally inward -- and it has to be, according to the logic of the modern firm.  Shareholders are the ones to whom we managers are accountable, not customers.  There is an inevitably adversarial relationship set up that our contact center colleagues have to live with.  Customers often want things the firm cannot (or at least will not) give, and it is the job of the contact center staff to serve the company (don't bother protesting that they are paid to serve the customer first, because we all know it is not really true).  So it is truly difficult to imagine a sustained contact center success in which both the customers and the contact center staff enjoy the process of interacting with each other.  More commonly, contact center agents learn to tolerate customers, and to enjoy their work environment and their colleagues.

Consider some facts about the current industry we are in.  Most companies push self-service and try to make it fully functional and highly personalized (people routinely speak and are rewarded as if 100% self-service is the goal, which I find frankly amazing for most businesses).  They do this not because consumers demand it; rather, they do it because it saves money and returns better results to investors.  Self-service is valuable to customers, when it adds convenience and gets the job done.  But often that is not possible, and customers often need to speak to someone.  In these cases, customers are commonly made to listen to a 30-second promotion of the web-based alternative before being allowed to speak to a human, with no possibility of parole (I mean, no ability to  "pound out").  This is not done to help the customer; it is done to push the customer to the web, which is cheaper.  We make our customers do our work for us, since we do not have to pay their salaries.  Meanwhile, those customer service representatives we cannot quite eliminate are made to work on rigorous schedules in order to "match the forecast curve" so that enough people will be available to handle the expected inbound traffic that can't be diverted to self-service.  People look over their shoulders to check that they are doing all the things they are supposed to (an admittedly one-sided view of "quality monitoring"), and adherence systems measure their exact compliance with the published schedule.  "Workforce Optimization" systems exist to do what they say they are going to do -- to ensure that your workforce is optimized by getting them to be where you tell them to be, doing exactly what you tell them to do, 97% of the time, with exceptions carefully measured and analyzed.  We have created, for service, what Henry Ford did for manufacturing and what Charlie Chaplin commented on in his film Modern Times.

Does this make sense to the consumer, or the agent, in any of us?   How many of us like calling into contact centers ourselves, as consumers?  How do you think it feels for agents to face that cold wall of hostility generated when people know they are being treated as abstract things to be exploited, and then to go home and have to deal with it from the other side as they attempt to be served themselves?  In the immortal words of John Hobbes, the life of the typical contact center agent is "nasty, brutal and short", and our lives as consumers are full of indignities and deep frustrations over the way the increasingly global-scale companies we are forced to deal with treat us.  This is why we need a revolution!
Why (r)evolution?  I use the strange word (r)evolution for three reasons (NOTE: the positive part starts here...):

First, what is starting to happen is evolutionary in technological terms.  There are elements yet to be invented, but most of the required elements exist in some form today, somewhere.  Not all are used in customer service scenarios, though.
Second, what is starting to happen is revolutionary in business terms.
Third, what is starting to happen is a return to something we had before, and is thus an example of the literal root of the word revolution -- a re-volution, or a turning back around.  

This notion of (r)evolution will be one of the recurring themes of my posts in 2007, as I believe it encapsulates all of the goals of the Dynamic Contact Center and beyond -- the goals of delivering a superior consumer experience and greater profits -- at the same time.

Camus said "We acquire the habit of living before that of thinking".  A corollary is that we acquire the habit of working before that of thinking hard about what we do.  When we work in corporations that have routines like MBOs* and QBRs**, we naturally pursue our individual goals by attaining our MBOs and shining in our QBRs.  The system practically requires it: if I set up objectives and tie your compensation to them, then I am telling you to pursue your own self-interest and I am taking on the responsibility of protecting the company's interests by my skillful design of your objectives.  Alas, many the dysfunctions that obviously result from such a Faustian bargain are willingly entered into by both of us (in high-functioning organizations, we just pretend not to notice this and focus on doing the right thing despite our "MBO contract").  People trying to do the right thing (that would be most of us) will often diligently pursue goals that no longer serve the needs of the company, but the situation often goes on because no one has time to step back and take a fresh look from time to time.  

This is more or less how we got to where we are today (that is why the first part of this post is uncomfortable to contemplate), but the situation is very changeable.  This is the key to revolutions -- people realize that they have been living with a series of uncomfortable assumptions about the world around them, and they resolve to change things for the better.   Unlike our climate situation (perhaps), these inconvenient truths can be changed.

The catalyst for change is consumer demand, and specifically consumer demand for voice.  Consumers are empowered by Web 2.0 possibilities, and they want to be part of the value creation that they finance with their cash.  In the words immortalized in film, they are mad as hell and they aren't going to take it any more.  When advertisements can be ignored or eliminated, and when essentially all information is available for free online, consumers are able and willing to free themselves from the shackles imposed by the logic of managerial capitalism.  When blogs and sites like Flickr and YouTube exist, one person' bad experience with service can become a global indictment of a company, suddenly changing the rules of the game without warning (this happened to Dell in the summer of 2005).  When just about anything can be bought directly from companies around the globe, or from other consumers directly, consumers demand to know what we (in the enterprise) bring to the table.  If we focus on cost reduction and treat consumers accordingly, they will focus on price and treat companies accordingly -- and businesses will all suffer in the rush to the bottom (which is to say, the commoditization of just about everything that used to be differentiable in a world of information censorship, including us).  

The divide between the world of business and the world of living is eroding, and this is a good thing.  When work follows us home, we learn to re-establish a way of living much more like those of our forebears -- the creation and consumption of value are inextricably linked, not isolated by the artificial boundary of the office tower lobby or the time clock.  

Consumers demand to be treated as real individuals, and to take part in the value chain.  We should let them.  The technologies, as I mentioned, are mostly available, although mostly they are aimed at the wrong problems.  For instance, WFO aims at enforcing compliance among the workers; instead, a Productivity Platform should aim to do whatever it takes to enable -- and empower -- our workers to serve customers intelligently, effectively and pleasantly.  If we are really good at our jobs, then we should have plenty to offer our consumers.  Why not offer it in a way that is not condescending?  Why not help them decide, and help them drive how they get served?  Why not negotiate in good faith?  There are a lot of consumers out there around the world, and the key idea is that technology has made it possible for us to deliver great service experiences to consumers around the globe in a way that creates greater demand for value exchange -- led by the consumer who is an active part of the value chain -- and to do so at a reasonable cost.  But we cannot do it if we cling to old ways of thinking and managing.  

So, let us begin 2007 together with a commitment to exploring the possibilities -- and the practicalities -- of the (r)evolution in customer service.

Vive la (R)Evolution!

Comments welcome of course...;)

* I highly recommend the book The Support Economy, by Shoshana Zuboff and David Maxmin (Penguin Books, 2002) for a discussion of the problems with managerial capitalism and its historical predecessor, proprietary capitalism.  It is a hard read, and somewhat repetitive, but it is worth the effort because there are many very challenging ideas presented, and by and large they are right on the mark.  In particular, their discussion of "the transaction crisis" and the "individuation of consumption" gave me much to think about, as they gave form to several "protoideas" I have been thinking about for some time.  Check it out: The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism
**Objectives to support Management By Objective objectives, for some strange reason commonly mis-abbreviated as MBOs.
***Quarterly Business Reviews