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The annual meeting place for the entire customer service industry. That was the headline for the Customer Service and Customer Experience 2022 conference, which this year was held on May 18th in Copenhagen, focusing on challenges and opportunities within customer experience, customer service and technical contact center solutions.

As a Connexio delegate, I was inspired and spotted trends in customer service. This was partly at the Customer Service Conference and partly at President Summit 2022, the leading business conference in the Nordics, which was also held in Copenhagen the same week (May 16 and 17) under the title Rethinking Business. 

Use systems wisely
While around 5000 people attended the President Summit, the customer service conference with 400 participants was more focused. Among other things, with concrete customer service cases, where Maersk, for example, talked about building their call center and generously shared their experiences and mistakes on their journey in this regard. Both equally valuable.

WHO? talked about the challenges with their customer service. Previously, their customer service was so manual that agents were writing the same email many times a day to customers. By automating something as simple as sending an email receipt, they saved significant resources, even though each email only took 10-20 seconds to write. Their point was that by using systems wisely, agents have more time for the necessary human contact.

The Human Factor
During the two days, I heard presentations on everything from why people are the most important tool for success and a prerequisite for your organization and company's innovation, to how to take care of yourself, to presentations on personal ambition, motivation, mental health and how to deal with uncertainty about your future.

The common denominator at both conferences was an awareness of the human factor as crucial to the success of organizations and businesses. Systems can free up time and increase the return on employee effort, but fundamentally, success is created by people.

At the President Summit, the connection between taking good care of yourself and the ability to create value for your workplace was articulated as how personal health reflects as success in a professional career and thus success for the organization you work for.

Mistakes and emotions
Both conferences emphasized the importance of the CEO, manager and employee being able to admit mistakes and see mistakes as an important source of learning. We need to get better at accepting the feelings we have when things don't go as planned and learn from them. It was inspiring to hear how Maersk, for example, in their story of their customer service journey, presented their mistakes as valuable learnings in their process. They were proud of the mistakes they had learned from.

The point is that your ability to embrace your mistakes is reflected in the organization. If you have many employees who accept and learn from their mistakes - and a culture where it's legal - it can become a way to develop and innovate more.

The balance between automation and the agent
In summary, the clear trend is that despite the rapid development of technology and opportunities for automation, humans - customer service agents - still play the most important role in modern customer service. modern customer service.

Automation is an important tool to reduce the number of tickets, but at the same time, companies shouldn't become so automated that customers can't connect with a human. And as a customer service customer, no one wants to feel like a "ticket" to be dealt with.

Therefore, it's about making a crucial choice in your assessment of when your customers can be appropriately helped by a chatbot or self-help and when human contact provides the crucial value for customers.

Read more about the two conferences here:

https://www.presidents-summit.com/

https://www.peopleteam.dk/konferencer/konference-kundeservice-kundeoplevelser-2022/