Customer Satisfaction was considered an effective method of measuring how a company provides service and a direct outcome of good customer service is loyal customers and repeat business. For customers, it was increased in their own profits and up-time of their equipment.
IT industry has changed over the period due to the change in delivery of service to the customers. These days we talk of Cloud Offerings, Automation, Automatic service request generation and management etc that have impacted the way we serve our customers. All these have added significant amount of complexities in the way we used to manage customers traditionally in the IT industry.
Cloud Computing has converged the infrastructure into compute, network and storage components which could mean multiple levels of collaboration and touch points within the service requests. The customer could now experience varied level of service depending on the complexities of the problem. This could cause a very significant impact of customer satisfaction experience.
Automation has added another level of complexity as now the service request could now be processed without any human contact and service requests could see machine updated “templates” v/s personalized message.
Since traditional customer satisfaction depends on personal touch and hopefully single point of contact who could “own” the customer problem and provides, it would be an interesting to see how these new trends come to play and impact customer satisfaction.
Being in the customer service business for over 30+ years and very passionate about the same, I would be watching this area closely and see how best I can contribute to ensure we continue to provide the best customer experience to our customers.