I had a pleasure to attend Elisa Corporate Customers Digital Customer Service event last week, where Elisa and their partner eGain were representing how they see the world changing in the customer service side.  eGain’s CEO was describing how customer service is seen to be evolving as generations are changing rapidly. For example, Generation Z has different learning habits, consumption habits and view as how they relate to work and world around them. They consume on the spot as they were born digital, are not loyal and don’t want to be drudges. Therefore, businesses need to change, change dramatically.

The old way of doing business doesn’t work for Generation Z anymore, transformation is required and the ones who are capable of fast and agile transformation are the winners. What was striking to me personally is the part where eGain’s CEO was claiming that in the future, the old business models don’t work anymore, old companies have to think about their offering through new business models. When thinking about the different business models, service design tools and methods serve a good basis for building a new and fresh approach, as the customers are heavily involved designing and co-creating the services together with relevant stakeholders. This is a huge task to be done with many companies, some of them don’t even realize the change is going to be huge. Once company has awaken to the need of change, still the path is long and pretty cumbersome, but it needs to be taken. Once, service and business model have been tested vigorously and seen to fly on a level that is satisfying the customer’s and company owners, the legacy process have to be adapted to the new business model, not the other way around.  That means that many companies need to think about their future business models, their processes and their legacy systems, how to change them and transform them around to support new business models and new ways of doing business. That’s good news as us future service designers are needed heavily in the future business transformation.