Where's the Vision?

I interact quite a bit with executives in the customer service arena on a daily basis. From the folks that have yearly P&L responsibility for the whole of customer service to the folks that have daily responsibility for operations and with the folks that are becoming more common in organizations in a role that is part IT part Business Operations.

The common trend that I am hearing from them all is that they are more and more being overwhelmed with the volume of requests they get from sales teams about new technology in the market for customer service. But as I dig, they also tell me that they are seeing nothing out there that is making them sit up in their chair and say "wow".

A common theme I hear is that while there are seemingly more and more vendors of "solutions" out in the market, there is less and less true innovation in customer service technology. And I would tend to agree with them. There was the ACD, which revolutionized the way people communicate with companies. Then there was the IVR, which in it's prime was a fantastic innovation. There was Workforce Management technology to free people from the bonds of Excel. There was cloud routing technology that tied together disparate ACD's. There was call recording technology that gave companies a view into the customers world.

Those have been the biggies in the last 20 years. But what do we have to show for the last 5-7 years? Sure, we can say that the whole space around analytics has had a pretty significant impact in some companies, but I don't know that we can really lump it in yet with the likes of the others above. It may get there, but the jury is still out.

Where is the next true innovation in customer service? What is the next frontier that will upend the way we think about deploying customer service? And will it come from someone like Verint, Nice, Interactive Intelligence, Cisco, Avaya, Genesys? Or will it come from the likes of Apple?