HELLO, HOW CAN I HELP YOU? THE FUTURE OF CUSTOMER SERVICE IN SWEDISH SERVICE COMPANIES

Abstract

Continuous developments within digital services have disrupted the power balance between consumers and suppliers, and consumers have more power than ever before. As customer experience has become one of the most important ways for organizations to achieve differentiation and competitive advantage, the empowered customers, and their perceived experience has become a top priority for companies. Since customer service is a central piece of the customer experience puzzle, companies need to learn how to work with customer service in the age of the customer. The purpose of the study has been to provide insights on how Swedish service companies will work with customer service in five years. This was done by identifying trends that will drive future developments within customer service and assessing their level of certainty, potential impact as well as interconnectedness. The research was conducted through a qualitative study with the means of a scenario analysis framework. By collecting and analyzing secondary data as well as primary data from leaders and experts within some of the leading Swedish companies within the area of customer service, the twelve most influential trends were identified. The twelve trends encompass different areas which affects the future of customer service, such as; how customers prefer to consume service, regulations, new service features enabled by technology as well as internal trends such as structural shifts within organizations. Furthermore, seven of the trends are characterized as certain and five as uncertain. Based on this, four different scenarios of how companies will work with customer service in five years were generated by giving the two most critical uncertainties extreme values. The findings reveal that primarily external factors, namely ambiguous demand patterns, and digital regulations, pose as the uncertainties with the highest potential impact. However, the trend of increased customer demands and expectations was found to have the highest impact and the lowest uncertainty overall, which is why it is likely that this trend overpowers the eleven other trends and acts as the main driver. Thus, Scenario 1 is found to be the most likely, where more technological features are adopted in customer service and automation increases without limitations by external forces, in order to comply with customer demands.