By Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP

Customer service is dead.

Here is how it used to work: a customer would seek out a product or service, approach an employee, and explain what she needed. The helpful salesperson would calibrate her request with the business’ products and find a match for the two. The customer would leave home happy; the employee would feel satisfied that she was able to help fill a product or service need. The algorithmic nature of customer service helped to set businesses who understood it early apart from those who didn’t. 

However, enough time (and practice) has passed for the majority of competitors to ‘get’ it. Customer service is now a commodity. The next frontier, customer experience, is ready to take over. 

Let me define each before illustrating how the evolution of service to experience affects business and HR. 

• Customer service is basic. It’s the one-to-one transaction between business/agent and customer, where the customer seeks a product or service, and the business is there to simply provide it. When you go to the grocery store for milk and ask where the dairy section is, the clerk points you in the right direction and off you go. 
• Customer experience is contextual. It takes into account the evolved values of the current consumer – customization, collaboration, speed, and freedom – and integrates these into a well-rounded shopping experience. The result is one network (the company’s) connecting to another’s (the customer’s) to create an ongoing relationship that feeds back to improve both experiences. Order shoes from Zappos.com and receive them the next day; call in to ask a questions and have a conversation that ‘wows’ you into coming back for more. 

The trouble with customer service is this; the interaction between business, agent and customer is no longer algorithmic. The world has become much more connected and saturated with available information for such operating software to be successful. Customer service has evolved into a richer customer experience. Consumers now demand richer contextual details to augment their shopping experiences – things like on-demand and aligned information sources, always-available markets, and an ongoing relationship with the supplier of the good or service purchased. 

How does this affect HR? It’s easy to see how it influences shifts in general business strategies, but less obvious how it affects the people who make these shifts possible. With the shift in consumer expectations from service to experience has come a blurring of boundaries between customer and business agent. The customer now drives the sale of goods and demands the context within which it is sold. The business is forced to open its communication channels with customers and effectively integrate their needs, opinions and demands into an evolving strategy. The institutional walls transform into an organic web that can respond to its lifeblood, the customer. As a result, the role of the customer and agent becomes blurred. Inside the organization, this means that agents must think, act and feel more like customers.

In response, people from within the organization begin to mimic the values, beliefs and expectations of the people from outside. Effectively, stakeholders on both sides of the equations begin to demand the same from the places they do business. For consumers, there is a demand to match the shopping context with their own needs; for the employee, there is a demand to match the workplace experience in the same way. 

It’s well known that at the heart of great customer experiences is a group of employees with the will to create the context. And what drives this will? Employee experience. HR’s need is then to respond in kind by offering its customers (that is, employees of an organization) what they demand: a solid employee experience rather than act as a simple centre for service.  

Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP, is a rewards coordinator with Best Buy Canada. Nilesh graduated from Simon Fraser University with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, First Class Honours. He majored in Human Resources Management and tacked on an extended minor in Psychology. He’s a self-confessed nerd (the first step is admitting), likes to read, loves hockey and is struggling with the complexities of learning the game of golf.