Three Key Pillars

to Reimagine
Customer Service
and Support
 Conventional wisdom tells us that customers need service and
support, but do they really? Customer service and support leaders
should challenge this wisdom by removing and redistributing customer
demand while restructuring the customer service organization.

Overview
Key Findings
• Customer demand for service and support has not been questioned, resulting
in a strategy that focuses on managing existing demand in the most effective
and efficient manner possible.
• Service and support leaders are so focused on managing the existing customer
demand for service that they fail to look at the origin of the interactions to determine
if these interactions are necessary or delivering value.
• Customer service and support leaders indicate that self-service is a top priority,
but self-service success rates across industries hover around 13%.
• Service and support largely handle routine interactions, so the opportunity to accrete
value to customers is limited as reps lack the skills, knowledge and time to do so.

Recommendations
Customer service and support leaders should reimagine customer demand for service
and support by:
• Removing interactions that erode customer value by addressing them at their source,
which will reduce the need for service, improve customer experience and positively
impact revenue and retention.
• Redistributing routine interactions from assisted service to self-service, resulting
in a lower cost per resolution and an improvement in the customer experience.
• Restructuring assisted service to deliver accretive value to the customer and
transition the assisted service function to be more proactive and prescriptive and
enable a better employee experience.

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Introduction
Service and support have played an essential role in organizations for decades. As
businesses grow and launch new products, the service and support team continues to
scale to support that growth. At its core, customer service and support has been about
managing the customer demand for service and support (demand management). Leaders
are challenged with accurately predicting customer demand for service, staffing the
operation to effectively manage that demand, and producing a yield that both satisfies
customers and the organization at a reasonable cost.
This entire cycle and operation presupposes a customer demand for service and support.
However, leaders don’t often fully understand how to quantify the complexities and sources
of the demand they need to manage. Very few organizations today look holistically at
methods to remove the demand by simplifying user experiences, helping build better
products, or improving policy and procedures.
Customer service and support budgets are flat or being cut, while organizations continue
to see double-digit growth. Even as leaders state that digital self-services experiences are
a top priority, a vast majority of support and service budgets are allocated to assisted service
resources. 1 Something has to change.
What would happen if that demand didn’t exist, or if you could remove certain customer
demand altogether? What would happen if you could move all repetitive or unnecessary
interactions to self-service? How would the charter of customer service and support
change?
Our goal with this research is to provide leaders with a system for removing demand,
redistributing demand and restructuring their organization to deliver customer value
that results in improved customer retention, growth and advocacy.

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Analysis
Three Key Pillars to Reimagine Customer Service
and Support
Reimagining the customer demand for service and support starts with an open mind. To
reimagine demand, we must replace the conventional wisdom that service and support
as we know it is inevitable with a new philosophical approach. We can reshape demand
by removing and redistributing it, enabling us to restructure our service and support
operation to move from being demand managers to value creators.
No one wants to spend eight hours a day taking the same three call types over and over
again, or listening to customers complain because they “shouldn’t have to call you in the
first place.” And customers shouldn’t be forced to contact support for a problem that is
known. That problem should be proactively anticipated and answered. Better yet, the
root of the problem should be permanently fixed upstream, eliminating the need for
the contact all together. We believe that service and support time is better spent servicing
interactions that accrete value to both the customer and the organization.
To get there requires a strategy, a set of guiding principles and a commitment. The
strategy includes three key pillars: remove, redistribute and restructure (see Figure 1).
Each of these pillars can be pursued simultaneously and are not designed to be
mutually exclusive.

Figure 1: Reimagine the Customer Demand for Service & Support

Remove Redistribute Restructure

From Managing Demand From 1:1 to Many:Many From Routine Interactions
to Reducing Demand to Value Creation

Goal: Remove demand Goal: Redistribute demand Goal: Restructure the

for service completely by from assisted service to organization to focus on
addressing policy, procedure self-service, communities, value-enhanced customer
and product issues that drive third-party, In-product/In-app interactions
demand for service and experiences
support

Source: Gartner

4
Guiding principles set the tone for the organization and shape the culture of the work
environment, helping everyone involved in the reimagined system understand what is
expected. Implementing the three pillars of the system will have cross-organizational
implications. The guiding principles provide a platform to “socialize” the reimagined
system throughout the organization.

Guiding Principles
1. Accept that customer demand for service and support is NOT as given.
2. Develop a holistic view of the total customer demand for service.
3. Be selective with the interactions that should remain in assisted service.
4. Anticipate customer need and build it into a great experience.
5. Don’t let bad policy, procedures or product cause downstream challenges for
customers or you.
6. Move from a reactive to proactive mindset.
7. View every engagement with a customer as an opportunity to deliver accretive value.
8. Ensure the customer experience is effortless.
9. Be open to allocate budget based on where the demand should occur.
10. Move the organization from demand managers to value creators.

Guiding Principles Understanding What Generates

Customer Demand and How It Is Serviced
Customer demand for service and support has many demand generators — some
positive, some negative. Negative demand generators are those that typically erode
customer and organization value. Positive demand generators provide an opportunity
for the organization to deliver value to customers in ways that drive both organization
and customer benefit. Therefore, a key tenet of the reimagine strategy is to look for
ways to limit or remove the negative while building organizational capability to more
effectively deliver on the positive.
Service and support leaders take interactions from customers simply as a given, but
they shouldn’t. Service has a unique vantage point within the organization to observe,
spot trends and quantify the costs associated with interactions. Today leaders often only
focus on their assisted service interaction volume, using contact reasons to understand
these demand generators. However, this is too small of an aperture and is akin to looking
through a straw as opposed to looking through a telescope.

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 Just because you have your thumb on the contact reasons for assisted
service doesn’t mean you have perspective on what generates the
customer demand for your service.

Leaders should widen their aperture and establish a holistic picture of the
demand generators by fully understanding where the demand is being addressed.
By establishing a holistic picture, leaders will appreciate that much of the support
that is required for their products and services is happening outside of their view
(see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Demand Funnel

Negative Demand Generator Positive Demand Generator

Outdated Policies Transacting
Confusing Procedures Learning
Unclear Communications Helping
Poor Product Quality Renewing
Unshared Knowledge Advocating
Repeat Contacts Optimizing

Percentage Third Party

of Demand ? Many:Many Remove
by Channel

Social and Communities

60% Many:Many

Redistribute
Self-Service
Many:1
30%

Assisted Service
Restructure
10% 1:1

Source: Gartner

6
The first step in reimagining the demand for service is to quantify the total demand.
Leaders must account for all interactions by analyzing traffic from all areas where
customers are receiving service, such as web self-service portals, community posts,
external search engines and third-party support activity (see Figure 3). While some
organizations do quantify demand for service, it is often limited to assisted service
interactions. Very few organizations quantify customer demand that is handled in
self-service, and even fewer understand the total demand.

Figure 3: Reimagine Customer Demand

Quantify Classify and Reimagine

Demand Generation Remove

• Interactions that erode value

• Interactions that are traceable and tied to
repetitive product, policy and procedure
Third Party issues
Many:Many
Redistribute
Social and Communities
Many:Many • Transactional
• Repetitive/Known
• Standardized
Self-Service
• High Volume
Many:1

Assisted Restructure
Service
1:1 • Interactions that accrete value
• Interactions that are complex or sensitive

Source: Gartner

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Only once the demand has been quantified can leaders continue to move forward
with the reimagining efforts. The second step is to classify the demand generators
into categories. All customer demand for service and support is not equally valuable
to customers and service organizations. Leaders must classify interactions of known
issues that erode value distinctly from new and unknown interactions that accrete
value.
There are three general classification categories of demand:
• First, there is the demand that is not good for the customer and not good for
the organization. These are interactions that erode lifetime value and should
be removed altogether.
• Second, there is demand that exists and probably always will, but is routine,
predictable, transactional in nature and is best serviced through self-service
and other channels.
• And finally, there is demand that accretes value to customers, is complex or
sensitive, and is best serviced through knowledgeable, highly skilled staff

Remove Unnecessary Interactions

Removing unnecessary interactions is the most challenging part of the strategy,
but a critically important step that is frequently overlooked by service and support
leaders. Unnecessary interactions are those that erode value for the customer
or the organization, and can include interactions that are: A well-designed and
scalable chatbot platform should integrate seamlessly with VCAs and MCs (see
Figure 2).
• Avoidable issues and requests to include repeat contacts
• Driven by quality-related defects
• Driven by poorly designed products and services
• Low value, caused by wasteful processes that create unnecessary effort for the
customer
• Low value, caused by outdated policies and procedures

Most often the root cause of the demand is complex, and has deep roots that have
cross-organizational implications. The process of removing unnecessary demand
involves further classifying the negative demand generators and tracing the
source. To do this leaders must implement new processes, systems and teams to
codify demand removal and formally make it part of customer service and support
charter. This new team must work cross-organizationally and focus on initiatives to:
• Update outdated policies
• Clarify confusing procedures
• Develop plain language communications
• Fix product quality issues
• Share insights you know with customers
• Remove repeat contacts

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The process of removal can take considerable time and energy, but is well worth it
as it permanently removes cost from the organization while improving the overall
customer experience.

Redistribute Interactions Away From Assisted

Service
In recent years organizations have turned to online and digital experiences as a solution to
manage scalability, provide self-service capabilities and generally try to improve the overall
experience for customers. This focus coincides with customer preference for self-service
as well as a desire by organizations to use self-service to increase access, scale and cost
savings. And while the customer and organizational stars align on self-service, the result is
anything but stellar. According to a Gartner study, only 13% 2 of all self-service interactions
are successful. 2 While the pivot to digital is a necessary and key step, it is proving
insufficient to not be enough.
Redistributing interactions should not stop at self-service. Leaders should continue to
look for ways to scale and use all available channels in their redistribution strategy. Each
channel, whether many-to-many or many-to-one, provides a unique opportunity to
redistribute specific demand generators. Figure 4 highlights the redistribution strategy
and the available channels “left” of assisted support that organizations should use.

Figure 4: Redistribute Customer Demand from 1:1 to Many:Many

Cost
Scale

Many:1 Many:Many Many:Many 1:Many 1:1

In-app/ Third Party Communities Self-Service Assisted

In-Product and Social Service and
Support Media Support

Source: Gartner

9
To effectively deploy a redistribution strategy, evaluate interactions to determine if they
are best suited to be redistributed from one-to-one interactions to many-to-many. Key
considerations include:
• Interactions that are repeatable, known issues that provide low value through
human interaction
• Interactions that can be automated in total or in part
• Interactions that you may not have the expertise to answer
• Interactions that customer service and support may not be trusted to answer
• Interactions where a quick answer is critical to a customer overcoming an obstacle
in their journey

Service and support leaders can leverage the Gartner Tool: Issue to Channel Mapping
to analyze and determine which channels are best to service which type of demand
generators.

Restructure the Organization to Deliver Value

Redistributing the volume of repeat and known questions to self-service requires leaders
to rethink their strategies for managing the remaining incoming volume to assisted
service. If the majority of the known interactions that used to require assisted service
resources to solve are now being solved in a self-service experience, the remaining
demand is very different. Furthermore, there exists a subset of positive demand that
organizations will want to keep. This demand presents an opportunity for the organization
to accrete value to the customer. In order to do this effectively, organizations’ assisted
service function will need to evolve.
By redistributing work to self-service, the remaining work is made more complex, and
therefore the organizational structure that currently exists is no longer able to support
the remaining demand. As a result, leaders will need to reframe the organization’s charter
to continue effectively supporting the remaining volume.
Organizations will need to take an inventory of the resources they have and the
processes, workflows and analytics that exist. Leaders must determine what
considerations need to be made to support the evolution to:
• Complex Interaction Management — enables reps to evolve from high volume
processors of low value interactions to knowledge workers who can handle more
complex interactions
• Customer Value Creation — enables reps to move from solving problems to helping
customers achieve value Knowledge and Content Development — provide knowledge
workers time to spend on the development of content to fuel self-service and support
assisted service
• Data Analytics — provides knowledge workers time to perform data analysis to further
advance the remove and redistribute strategies

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• Customer Journey Management — moves from vertical channel silos to a focus on
horizontal customer journey management with shared budget, metrics, priorities,
technology and data

In support of the above, leaders will need to assess if resources can be reskilled or
retrained into highly skilled knowledge workers and subject matter experts, or if they’ll
need to hire new talent to do so.
The reimagine system is made achievable by simultaneously focusing on all three pillars:
remove, redistribute and restructure. It will enable leaders to develop strategies that will
future-proof their organization and prepare the organization for new ways of contributing
to the overall organizational objectives.
This note serves as the introduction to the reimagine system and will be followed by
additional content that will focus on each of the three pillars.

Evidence
1
Based on over 500 Gartner client inquiries and analyst experience over the past 5 years.
2
2020 Gartner Loyalty Through Customer Service and Support Survey. The goal of this
survey was to understand the drivers of customer loyalty in a customer service and
support interaction. We surveyed 6,000 customers about their interactions and resulting
decisions on whether to stay or leave the company.

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Actionable, objective insight
Explore these additional complimentary resources and tools for
customer service & support leaders:

Report Playbook
Focus on People and Process for Insulate Your Customer
Knowledge Management ROI Success Program From
Establish knowledge management Economic Uncertainty
as a fundamental component of your Scale your customer success function
customer service organization’s service and ensure initial success by implementing
delivery model. four key foundational pillars.

Download Report Download Playbook

Template Guide
How to Create a Customer Drive Self-Service with
Service Strategic Plan Automated Knowledge
Learn how to develop a clear, concise Management
and measurable customer service Discover how to deploy AI-enabled
strategic plan. automation and drive self-service with
automated knowledge management.

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