The relationships between the different types of service will shift in the coming years. The consumer expects more self service and is open to crowd service. Moreover, both are more efficient than personal service. In other words, shifting from personal service to self and crowd service ensures better service at lower costs.
Self service will gain importance faster than crowd service in the first few years. Many companies have already invested in self service, phone number library for example in the financial world or the travel sector. Investments in crowd service are still limited. In a second phase, crowd service will catch up. The crowd economy will grow even further, making the step to crowd service even smaller.
Personal service will of course continue to exist
but will decrease in importance and will only function as a kind of safety net. If consumers are not helped via self or crowd service, the need for a personal solution will continue to exist. Companies such as Booking.com , a pure online player, are already focusing on self service (the consumer makes bookings and adjustments themselves) and crowd service (questions about hotels are answered by other consumers). However, the company has a large call center to personally help customers if self and crowd service are not sufficient.
This table provides an indication of how the focus in customer service may evolve in the coming years.
Personal service Self Service Crowd Service
More and more companies are investing in self-service. The pure online players have worked out the concept well. They started out of necessity. At the start, these companies were too small to install personal customer service for their customers. An efficient and effective self-service channel was their only possibility for a good customer belgium numbers relationship. In addition, the banks were early adopters of the idea. Online banking was one of the most important activities of the first surfers on the web. At that time, the banks launched online banking purely for efficiency reasons for their own company. Today, it is the expectation of the customer.
Companies from various sectors are experimenting or living off self-service. The three examples below come from different angles: an sending files to multiple recipients offline retailer, a pure online player and a financial giant. All three use self-service as part of their customer service strategy.
Anytime Fitness