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The first one I call the evolution of the phenomenon of customer service itself. We all know that the world of service is always moving. It’s dynamic. For some people, they’re succeeding tremendously, but for many also they’re failing. There’s a dysfunction, and the dysfunction comes from a fundamental lack of understanding about how this world of service keeps on changing. If you don’t understand this, you can end up spending an enormous amount of time and effort and yet not actually producing the delight for your customers or the culture of internal service that you want. Part of the solution about getting yourself ready for the future is understanding where we’ve been in the past and where we are today. Here’s what I promise. What I’m about to show you will locate you within this arc of time. You’ll see where we are, how we got to where we are, and then see where it is that we’re going, so you can position yourself to succeed in that direction. The evolution of customer service is a phenomenon that has been occurring ever since there were customers and people who traded and bought and sold with each other. Over the course of our lifetimes, we can go all the way back to when service was where you went when there was a problem. The service center in many organizations was where you took something that broke, something that needed a spare part, something that needed troubleshooting or problem solving. That was often called the service center. And in business model, it was like the caboose at the end of the train. You had product development and marketing and sales and distribution and everything was going fine until something wasn’t. And that’s when you needed to go to the service center. But the world of service has evolved, and this idea of service only is fixing what went wrong shifted about three decades ago to a very strong focus on the idea of satisfying the customer so that nothing does go wrong, so that you meet their expectations, so that you avoid making mistakes. This was the era of Six Sigma, ISO, zero defect, high focus on productivity, being lean, meeting and making service level agreements. The problem with that was it soon became commoditized. When you had standards systems that people were using to produce customer satisfaction, it turned out that many organizations could do it, and so service evolved. The focus became not just on satisfying customers, but this idea of delighting customers, amazing customers, exceeding expectations, earning compliments, standing out from the competition. Moments of personal touch, moments of magic, surprise your customer. And that was well and good, except it turned out to be far too ad hoc. It depended too much on individual service heroes or company policies that allowed people to go outside the bounds and beyond the operating manual and do something extraordinary at the right moment. Now, that was nice, but it was too unpredictable. It couldn’t be delivered on a consistent basis. And so the world evolved again, so that the whole domain of customer service became a concern for customer experience. Right from the beginning in the early marketing and engagement through the sales process into the onboarding, then the utilization, answering questions, helping people to maintain and even upgrade whatever it is that they bought and were receiving from you. The whole lifecycle, the customer journey across multiple channels, whether it was online, on the website, in person at the branch, through the app, on the ATM, whatever it might be. Every one of those touch points was monitored and improved to create a better customer experience in which customers had to invest, well, perhaps less effort to get what it is that they wanted and needed and desired. But then even that became somewhat commoditized, like it wasn’t really just the competitive advantage anymore. And so the focus shifted one more time. This time to the idea of serving customers in a way where you actually warranted and earned their loyalty. What’s the likelihood you would recommend us to a colleague or a friend, that famous NPS score? How many referrals and recommendations do we actually get? Are people buying from us again? And preciously, are they putting positive comments into the social media world? And that’s where things have been until just before this COVID pandemic era. Now the world is changing one more time, and that is to focus not just on customer service, but to authentic customer care in which those who you serve understand and genuinely experience that you have a commitment to their well-being. Such a high level of commitment that they trust you to become their advisors and partners for the future. And you’ll notice that I wrote mutual well-being because in an authentic partnership based on customer care, they also care about your well-being as much as you care about theirs. That kind of a partnership is something genuinely special, and that is a threshold that all industries are on today.