Customer Service Leaders to Spend on Digital in 2021

Seventy percent of customer service and support leaders plan to dedicate the largest portion of their budgets to digital channels and capabilities in 2021, according to a survey by Gartner. In fact, transitioning to self-service channels and bolstering digital capabilities remains a top priority for many customer service and support leaders for the year ahead.

Migrating contact volume from assisted to self-service channels, upgrading legacy contact center technology, and automating customer service processes, all of which fall under digital channels and capabilities, were the top three most important priorities in 2021 (see Figure 1).

"Although 2020 challenged the operations and strategy of many service and support leaders, the focus on developing a greater digital and self-service product in 2021 remained consistent," said Jacob Joseph-David, senior principal in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice, in a statement. "To deliver on this digital promise, service leaders must progress beyond adding new channels and capabilities to making the functional transformation into a self-service-dominant organization."

 

There is also a growing focus on understanding customer experiences through data. In the next 10 years, service leaders foresee a large shift from simply handling customer requests to using customer data to provide high-quality service that handles both the issue at hand and the larger end-to-end experience.

"Collecting voice of the customer data is one the best tools service leaders can deploy to understand customer experience," Joseph-David said. "To facilitate the shift to end-to-end experience, service and support leaders will need to benchmark their current voice of the customer data collection methods and understand the value of the data currently collected via each method and the future value of the methods in the next five years."