tralian Customer Experience Professionals Association (ACPXA) publishes quarterly rankings for Australian call centres, with local councils, banks, telcos and energy companies frequently topping the list for poor experience. The ACPXA estimates that last year, Australians spent 107 million hours waiting for customer service departments to resolve issues. For many organisations, these delays can be catastrophic. Even a brief hold at the wrong time can seriously degrade a customer’s experience and diminish how they perceive a company. In some cases, it can rapidly drive them to a more responsive competitor. There is an urgent need to transform customer support operations from a frustrating, stressful situation into an optimised experience that meets a customer’s needs efficiently and effectively while building trust and loyalty. This involves new methods and processes, as well as new technologies such as Generative AI (GenAI). 1. Customer support is a product or service as well When it comes to reinventing customer service journeys, organisations need to consider customer support as a product or journey. Customer satisfaction for a support call is just as important as customer satisfaction with a product they’ve bought. Around 9 in 10 customers believe the experience a company provides – which includes support – is just as important as its products. To start with journey reinvention, look at the data to see the types of problems customers are trying to solve through customer service. Think about how best to design a customer service journey around remediation for those problems across channels and digital touchpoints. For example, GenAI can be used to enhance and humanise support requests, such as creating intelligent chat tools that respond to customers quickly and at scale. Ikea’s AI chatbot ‘Billie’ handled nearly half (47 per cent) of all customer queries in its first two years of operation, enabling 8500 call-centre agents to be re-trained as interior designers.  2. The importance of connecting CX and EX Transforming CX goes hand-in-hand with transforming employee experience (EX). Employees need the right tools to provide more robust, personal service. Technology must be designed and implemented to account for how both customers and employees will use it.  In many cases, customer service frustrations stem from a lack of employee resources and investment, whether technology or training. Organisations should start by looking at the customer service journey from an employee’s point of view. How many disparate systems do agents have to access to look up the right customer information and make changes to customer accounts? GenAI can also play a role here, helping employees access internal sales knowledge quickly and respond to common customer questions with the most effective language. Staff can make queries in natural language with GenAI, to rapidly bring up the information they need. This can reduce training time and time to serve customers. 3. Use customer success to differentiate your brand Traditionally, customer service support has been considered a cost centre rather than a value driver. Part of the problem is the metric that companies are using to define success: time to serve. Employees are rated on how quickly they can resolve customer issues or how many calls they can take during a shift, which doesn’t always incentivise resolution. KPIs and metrics surrounding customer service need to be redefined to demonstrate how they show up on the balance sheet and affect the bottom line. Resolving issues quickly not only saves time for both employees and customers – which is a cost saving for the organisation – but also increases satisfaction on both sides. In one example, an e-commerce company created a persona to reach out to new customers via email. As soon as a customer signs up or purchases a product, this persona reaches out proactively with an automated message and checks in with customers periodically throughout their purchase journey. Studies have found that customers who have had an issue successfully resolved report higher satisfaction than those who never experienced an issue at all. Other research reveals a very high correlation between customer service and loyalty. Ambitious brands across industries need to re-think their approach to customer service and harness new technology as part of an end-to-end service journey from the point of view of customers and employees.