Slides from Mary Meeker’s, Internet Trends 2014 – Code Conference
I was reading through Mary Meeker’s latest report on internet trends: Internet Trends 2014 – Code Conference. As I read through it I was trying to think about what it tells us about how customer service might develop over the coming years. I’ve picked out a few key points from the slide deck.
- The cost of broadband and handsets continues to decrease
- Mobile data traffic shows ‘accelerating growth’
- Tablets show ‘early stage rapid unit growth’
- Video-sharing is on the rise
- Apps continue to be downloaded in huge volumes
- Apps are unbundling
- Healthcare might be an inflection point
The data points towards communication becoming increasingly both mobile and visual, with the use of apps central to this. Are we seeing the beginnings of an app-based customer service with video playing a key role? I’m probably not stating anything you already don’t know. But my question is this: If you already know this, or have an inkling that this is where customer service is heading, what are you doing about it? Are you designing your customer service with mobile in mind, or are you still focusing on call deflection?
And what do the advances and increasing consumerisation and digitisation in healthcare tell us about what customer service might look like in five or ten years time? How does this tie in with the rise in ephemeral apps, and the move towards impermanence? Are these fads? Are we hoping that they are fads, like we did with Twitter?
I’ve long been thinking that we are moving towards a more – on the fly, in the moment, spontaneous, serendipitous, and ultimately contextual – type of customer service. Let’s free customer service from its knowledge base, and my sense is that we will begin to see some real changes take place in this space. This approach enables the organisation to shift towards becoming more of a platform provider, with customers, agents, the willing and interested, having open access to tools which enable them to create or co-create resolutions for themselves, with agents, with customers, with the willing and interested as needed depending on the specific needs, urgency and context at that moment in time.
This doesn’t mean we lose all that we create after ten seconds, but perhaps we will think more carefully about what we do create, what the role of the organisation is in relation to the customer service it provides. What is left when we take Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, communities, the internet of things out of the equation? Is that the starting point for organisations to think about the type of customer service they will come to provide in the years to come?
