Reinventing Customer Service for 21st Century Commerce Experiences

Last weekend, I had the honor of accepting, on behalf of Gladly and my fellow Gladiators, the RILA award for Innovation at the 2019 RTech CEO Forum Innovation Awards. This means so very much as it’s an award chosen by the leaders of some of the leading retail brands in the US including Target, Ulta Beauty, Home Depot, and more. And it demonstrates their understanding of the importance of using a customer-centered service platform that engages their customer in a relationship as opposed to the legacy customer service platforms that are more transactional workflow tools, with cases and tickets at their core.

Customer service is something I’ve been passionate about since way back when. In earlier days, myself and Gladly co-founder Mike Wolfe were involved in building Kana, one of the first email customer service platforms back in the mid-90s. But 20 years later, we found ourselves drawn back to the space when we noticed one interesting thing: that over these two decades, the software that companies were using to communicate with their customers hadn’t really changed. While the iPhone had arrived and irrevocably changed the way that people communicate, using whatever channel works best in the moment—from calls, to emails, to SMS, Facetime, Messenger, etc. Yet the software that supported these communications and relationships between customers and companies still relied on tickets and case numbers. To add to that, every channel was siloed. That’s not a great approach to building a relationship—as we like to joke, “I want to be treated like a case”, said no one ever.

For customers, it meant stilted, standalone, and transactional customer experiences. Companies couldn’t keep track of what I’d talked about just 3 minutes ago simply because it took place with another agent or over a different channel—and it just didn’t make sense.

As I stood on the stage this weekend and talked about these challenges to the CEOs of today’s leading retailers, I saw a lot of heads nodding. Companies today understand that the customer experience is broken and that something has to change in order for it to get profoundly better.

Gladly’s innovation is driven from the core premise that customer service should be about people. Every conversation, no matter the channel is gathered into a single view so that the customer service teams helping customers can build more personal, empathetic relationships. And for retailers battling for their space in the era of ‘online everything’ and ‘2-day delivery’, it’s become increasingly apparent that the way forward is to forge those relationships that keep customers loyal for life.

We can’t say thank you enough to everyone at RILA for recognizing our team’s hard work in reinventing customer service. Of course, if you want to learn more about Gladly‘s approach to customer service software that puts people at the heart of it, and how we’re helping some of the leading retailers rethink their customer service strategy, reach out at www.gladly.com. And feel free to follow me here to keep up to date.