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I just did a quick Google search and realized that I could read or watch about 10 million blogs, whitepapers, and webinars on the infamous “top 5” or “top 10” trends related to customer service. I estimate that it will actually take until 2019 to get through all the material so perhaps I will miss out on 2018 altogether. Bad humor aside, I thought I would list 3 customer service experiences that need to end in 2017. I could do 5, 10, or probably 20 but here is the top 3:

Now that the Presidential election is beyond us, the last 18 months highlighted what a sharply divided country we live in today. The polarization and passion for political candidates reminded me of customer service channels in the world in which I eat, sleep, and drink. We have witnessed incredible improvements to the much hated interactive voice response (IVR), the launch of text based self-service, Facebook Messenger opened a new channel, and analytics software continues its adoption to drive both engagement and improvements to our agents.

The days when people worked only at traditional workstations, seated at a desk with a computer, paper in-tray and notebook in front of them, are long gone. Increasingly, people work while they are on the go, using tablets and phones to communicate and access their data.

As we’ve discussed in the past, there is a measurable difference between what companies think of the service they’re delivering, vs. what their customers think of that same service. We call this the perception gap, in which 80 percent of businesses ranked their service delivery highly, but only 8 percent of consumers agreed with them in their assessment.

Traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems have many flaws. First, callers are restricted to selecting from the choices the system gives them, which are necessarily limited. In order to interact with a traditional IVR system, customers must work through a series of menus, which many of them find frustrating.