From my inquiries with customer service professionals, I wanted to get a generalized view of where companies are with respect to implementing the very best of customer service initiatives.

It’s become pretty clear that most are struggling with outdated technology, systems that are not integrated together, and archaic or nonexistent knowledge management software. They haven’t deployed proactive chat or ventured down the social media path.

Worse, these customer service professionals are unsure of how to document the extent to which these factors are increasing operational costs; reducing customer lifetime value; and lowering sales, revenue, and profit margins. And they don’t know how to make the business case to show that, if these types of things were changed, the return would not only be positive, but (in many cases) very large.

Meanwhile, despite these huge handicaps, their organizations continue to expect them to provide great customer experience.

Time for a Change! Seems like something has to give. Doing things the same way and expecting different results is the definition of insanity! The question in my mind was how to collect this information I was finding in the inquiries. “How can I help to bridge the gap between what companies must do to provide great customer experiences and where organizations are at?”

More after the jump…

Customer Service and CRM FastForward Innovation Frameworks. Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Bill Band created the FastForward Framework for CRM. We decided that one of the best ways to document what we were hearing would be to take customer service, as a subset of CRM, and ask specific questions that focused on the multidisciplinary requirement to set customer service up for success. So we created the Customer Service Innovation Framework.

What Can You Do? Take the Customer Service Innovation Surveys! We want you to know that at Forrester, your opinion counts! And your voice will be heard! Not only will you be one of the first to see the results of the survey, but Elisse Gaynor — who covers Customer Service – Field Service for Forrester and who has been invaluable in making the survey available to you — will provide you with some extra goodies for participating!

It’s our way of thanking you for helping us document and prove to executives what must be done to advance and innovate one of the most important departments in any company: customer service… i.e., the department that is the most customer-facing groups of all departments…

How Do You Do That? It only takes 10 minutes. This is the first of five surveys, and we’ll need you to participate in all five. Each survey is on a specific aspect of customer service and in total they provide the whole picture required for companies to innovate and bring innovation to their customer relationships.

Log on here: Contact Center Agent and Staff Leadership Survey– Take it Now! http://deploy.ztelligence.com/start/index.jsp?PIN=13AWQ4R7PS37V

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, covering customer service and social media. She is often asked to share her opinions on TV and radio and in print in BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and many other major publications. She regularly blogs at The Forrester Blog for Business Process & Applications Professionals, where this blogpost originally appeared. She can be found on Twitter at @DrNatalie.