Las Vegas played host to Call Center Week in early June and I was lucky enough to attend.  While in Nevada, I got the opportunity to meet Twitter friend and customer service leader, Barry Dalton, in person. 

Barry is a seasoned customer service and CRM leader with 24 years of experience consulting Fortune 500 and mid-market companies. His expertise is focused on customer-centric strategy, operations and technology across all channels. He’s been a featured speaker at industry events, including Frost & Sullivan contact center conferences on topics ranging from what’s next in customer service, social business and big data customer analytics. 

I asked Barry about his thoughts on the customer service industry coming out of this great conference.

You've been around the customer service arena for some time now. Was there anything at this year's conference that truly surprised you?

The biggest surprise is what was conspicuous in its absence. In light of the monumental shifts we’ve seen in customer-driven engagement over the past five years, these mega-trends within which the contact center now needs to operate weren’t addressed. Much of conference was focused on core contact center operations.

While topics such as workforce management, recruiting, and multi-channel engagement are vital, I believe the conversation needs to be framed, now more than ever, in the context of how the contact center remains a viable function within the enterprise and delivers a higher-level strategic value to both internal and external customers.  

It’s revolution and reinvention time.  The stories of how the more progressive organizations are addressing the dynamic shift in customer-driven experience needs to be the next chapter in the contact center playbook.       

Were there any particular themes or topics that really stood out as the prevailing area of interest this year?

For insight into that, it makes sense to look at the conference’s topic tracks:

Transformational Leadership, Breakthrough Tools & Technology, Driven Insights & Analytics, Achieving Peak Performance, and Customer Experience Excellence.  

Of course, being the geek that I am, I spent most of my week at the sessions on technology and analytics. The interesting thing is that these two topics really run horizontally across all others. Much of the opportunities to achieve peak performance, create and deliver exceptional customer experiences and even become a transformational leader have a technology and data component to them.  

Think about things like how transformational leaders are creating collaborative business models leveraging enterprise collaboration tools and social media to communicate their vision across massive organizations in new, inventive ways. Or, how technologies such as virtual assistance, telepresence, voice of the customer analytics, and natural language processing are creating engagement and experiences that, in some customers' minds, far surpass the human-capital interactions they’ve become accustomed to. All the pieces are so interconnected, that’s where the next evolution of content for such conferences needs to go.  

Customer experience optimization is a big puzzle, with many pieces. It's like when you first dump out a new jigsaw puzzle. You need to start with an overview of the entire project. Then, what's the next thing we all usually do? We look for the corners and the edges to frame the rest of the puzzle.

As a Senior VP focused on multi-channel strategy, were there any specific talking points surrounding multi-channel that resonated with you?

Multi-channel was a popular topic with sessions such as "Increasing Sales in Multi-channel Centers" and "Revolutionizing Customer Experience across Multiple Channels." The reality is that the pace of change with respect to customer demand for emerging methods of communication is outstripping most of our ability to deliver. Multi-channel, which basically means, "Yes, we do phone, email, chat, SMS, social, etc." is already outdated and not good enough. Customers demand consistent experiences and information, regardless of the channel they choose. And if they decide to engage with your company via multiple channels, worse than delivering inconsistent experiences is not knowing where the customer has been in their journey, even before they hit one of your company's owned assets.   

You need to know that, prior to me dialing the 800 number, I just spent 10 minutes searching the web, on your Contact Us page and Tweeting with your staff. And don't ask me my account number more than once. This is the concept of omni-channel or agile. We all get that the demand is there. Where organizations are struggling is how to put all the pieces together. The channel and data integration effort is significant. And in hyper competitive markets where loyalty is fleeting, the justification needs to shift from how to cut more costs to delivering a superior, consistent customer experience, via whatever methods customers demand.

Looking beyond the conference, you Tweeted recently about focusing on what's next in customer service. What do you see as emerging topics/issues that tomorrow's service teams will be tackling? 

What's next? I think the answer to that revolves around these mega-trends we talked about at the top.  Social business.  Mobile. And when I say mobile, I include not only the mobile customer but the ever-growing mobile workforce.  Cloud. And big data. Of course, the impact of each one of these on contact centers, service, and customer experience is a lengthy conversation in itself.  But the other thing I'll leave you with on this question is what I think of as the shifting role of the contact center and customer service as an enterprise function.  

I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Price a few years ago. Bill was the architect of Amazon's customer service. He wrote a book, "The Best Service is No Service" in which he suggests that the value of customer service is not its ability to field more and more inquiries more efficiently through more channels. The real value to the enterprise, and to the customer, is shifting the focus to helping companies solve the up-stream, root cause drivers of demand for service.  Eliminating "stupid contacts" as Bill calls them.  

When you think about it, the issues that drive customers to seek out your contact center don't start in the contact center. They start someplace else in the organization.  Fix those. And then focus customer service, across all channels, on high value interactions that drive top line growth and word of mouth. The data and the technology are there. It's a matter of developing the right focus and finding the right customer service talent to earn a seat at the corporate strategy table.

Our thanks to Mr. Dalton for sharing his thoughts on the state of the customer service industry. Follow Barry’s blog Customer Service Stories…and other thoughts where he welcomes your contributions on experiences you’ve had about customer interactions on the job or as a consumer dealing with service organizations. Connect with Barry on LinkedIn, or follow him on Twitter.