Recently, I was invited to participate in a discussion about how to improve customer service outcomes.

At one point in the discussion, we were talking about how hard it can be to improve customer service outcomes given rising demand, high customer expectations, and the budgetary pressures that many customer service teams are under.

Whilst I agreed with that, I also suggested that the assumptions we make about how and where to serve our customers often don’t help us.

I was asked to illustrate what I meant by that.

I explained that many brands often assume that they have to be everywhere their customers are in order to better serve them.

What this has meant in recent years, as communication channels have proliferated, is that many customer service teams are faced with having to serve customers over an increasing number of channels, but often without a commensurate increase in budget or headcount.

This tends to lead to a situation where those teams are expected to deliver great service outcomes with a falling average level of investment per channel. In short, they are expected to do more with the same or, sometimes, less (i.e. lower levels of investment as a result of budget cuts).

That’s a problem, and it goes some way to explain why customers are not happy with the customer service they are receiving right now.

The assumption at the heart of this approach, as stated earlier, is that brands need to be everywhere their customers are.

But that assumption doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, particularly when you consider what we know about customers and how they behave regarding the prospect of better service or experience.

Consider this, for example: Given the option of travelling one city block to an average restaurant or two city blocks to a great restaurant, then most people, other things remaining equal, would choose to travel further to the great restaurant for a better experience.

The problem is that while we know that this is true in the physical domain, we seldom apply the same logic to the communication channel and digital domain.

As a result, brands assume that their customers will not ‘travel’ digitally in pursuit of better service or a better experience.

That seems like a big assumption that may not be helping us and is worth examining.

As Alan Alda once said, in a commencement address at his daughter’s college in 1980,

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”

It is realistic to think that brands could improve their service outcomes by cutting the number of channels that they serve their customers over and then focusing their resources on delivering better service in fewer channels rather than being barely average in a lot.

It would require brands to make some tough choices, to actually deliver great service in fewer channels but also communicate the change effectively.

It’d also be worth it.

This post was originally published on Forbes.com.

Credit: Photo by Silas Lundquist on Unsplash