Providing honest, good customer service is a low-bar to clear – or so it seems. A good customer service platform really just has to do one thing, put the customer first. On the outside, it looks like a simple grade-school high jump competition. The bar is low, it looks easy to jump, but once you get into all the technicalities of the Fosbury Flop, it starts to get a smidge dicey.

What provides meaning to professional life? Is it a fulfilling purpose, honest pay, moral alignment, or simply having friends among colleagues? All sorts of things, and any combination thereof, deliver meaning and purpose to people's professional lives. Vision statements encapsulate these motivations in (hopefully) tidy declarations, and these derive from the values that people saturate them with.

Most businesses maintain some sort of customer self-service tools, whether it’s a chatbot or guide bot framework or a collection of knowledge base articles. Chances are your business maintains some sort of a self-service option, but does your business do a good job of promoting that to your customers? Self-service provides customers the opportunity to solve a question on their own without directly involving your customer support team or help desk ticketing software.

A customer can expect everything from the ordinary to the seemingly impossible. But whether or not a customer is asking you to take them to the Moon or provide a simple reporting apparatus, your business needs to be able to meet their expectations in at least some manner, or risk the consequences.

Imagine you just bought a brand new guitar and you’re ready to shred. Your amp is on and set high, your cords are all plugged in, you’re ready to jam. You strum an E major chord only to find that it plays an F minor – not good. You just want to noodle over Baba O’Reilly but now you have to call support, explain a whole spiel, and potentially deal with long wait times and some irritating back-and-forth until you can finally realize your inner Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Raise your hand if you’ve heard that your business needs to be customer centric. Now raise your hand if your business is customer centric. If you didn’t raise your hand at all – and not only because you are in a public space and are wary of strangers seeing you perform erratic movements – then you better quickly learn why your B2B business needs to be customer centric. Never even heard of customer centricity?

Rome wasn’t built in a day – and it didn’t fall in one either. Come the 4th and 5th centuries, the leaders neglected the needs of their various peoples, and oftentimes, as in the case of Majorian, they seemed outright surprised at the unpopularity of some measures. Could Majorian have used a 360-degree view of his Roman subjects (read: customers)?

Living in the Digital Age, so much of our lives are saturated with data and information. But with so much information available, sometimes we can feel like Johnny Mnemonic, past cranial-storage capacity, where additional data doesn’t help us solve any problems, and instead makes it even more difficult to solve problems.