"Thank you for your patience – we will connect you with the next available agent ...” 

Is there anyone in the modern world who has never heard this or a similar recorded message while on hold during a call to a service hotline? But holding the line will be a thing of the past in the customer service of the not so distant future. Products and processes are constantly improving in quality, becoming more reliable, as well as more self-explanatory. At the same time, ­customers are becoming more autonomous: the many possibilities offered by the Internet and the accelerating spread of high-performance, mobile multimedia end devices put information at their fingertips without regard for time and place.

As technological innovation progresses, the degree of automation in services will rise substantially, while customers ­simultaneously enjoy more and more flexible access opportunities in many more different ways. The simple, standardized first-level queries in particular will be solved by end consumers acting on their own with the support of self-service features.

These developments will revolutionize service to the customer provided by companies in the future – customer service in its original form, that of the classic call center as the exclusive ­responsible organizational service unit for direct contact between customers and companies, will certainly have vanished. Service in 2032 will be a holistic process practiced at many and varied touch points. It will utilize completely different forms of communication.

More autonomous customers and changed communication behavior

The position of consumers in the interplay between supply and demand has undergone fundamental and permanent change in recent years. Consumers are faced with an overabundance of products. Services are highly developed technologically as well as increasingly standardized and interchangeable, giving rise to buyer’s markets where customers are more and more frequently the ones “calling the shots”. More than anything else, consumers benefit from the rapid development of Web 2.0, which has enabled them to be better informed and more critical in their decisions for or against a product or service. Furthermore, mobile technologies allow customers to access the information they require almost constantly – no matter when and no matter where they happen to be.