The customer service gap no one is fixing

Ask your department heads how things are going, and you’ll hear good news. Leads and engagement are up, sales hit quota, and customer service is chipping away at response time. Every dashboard is green. But ask your customer, the one that’s been passed along three times in five minutes between chatbots and agents and intervention specialists, and you’ll get a different report. Because she’s explaining her story for a fourth time: This company knows my birthday, my shopping history, and my shoe size. But they can’t remember the conversation they had with me 60 seconds ago. And yet both things are true. Your dashboard is green, and your customer is on a hamster wheel. That’s the trap. Companies grade their performance one department at a time. But your customer is grading based on her experience of one company, start to finish, and the whole operation’s getting a D-plus. The gap between those two scorecards lives in the handoffs—the moments a customer passes from one team to another—and that’s precisely where most companies are struggling. Leaders seem to know this. In a recent survey we conducted at KPMG of 300 marketing, sales, and service executives, 87% said integrating customer…