The World Has Changed. Have You? — A New Paradigm For Customer Service Management By Dr. Vijay Mehrotra, Decision Sciences Department in the College of Business at San Francisco State University

With more customer-facing channels to manage, growing customer expectations and increasing competitive pressures, delivering quality customer service is more complex than ever. Companies that have adjusted to this changing environment are now achieving important results, including significantly lower operating costs and visibly higher customer loyalty rates. These organizations are embracing new metrics, such as Monthly Contacts Per Customer, Customer First Contact Resolution Rate ("First Call Resolution" is no longer enough), and Customer Service Channel Preference Rate. In addition, these centers have also embraced newly available technology to help manage these new metrics. The combination of a fresh, customer-centric management approach with the right enabling technology has allowed leading firms to effectively manage increasingly diverse and complex service operations, producing better customer service at lower cost levels.

On the other hand, organizations that are still churning out the same type of reports and metrics that they were using just a few years ago are in trouble, and may soon find themselves at risk with their increasingly demanding customers.