Benefits of customer service digitization

What is Digital Customer Experience?

• The Digital Customer Experience represents the overall communication between a brand and its customer via digital channels such as desktops, mobile phones, iPad, or other devices.

Why Digital Customer Service?

According to a study by McKinsey and Company, e-care represents the future of customer service. So much so that customer satisfaction can experience an increase of up to 33% with the implementation of customer service digitization. Digital technology and solutions have reshaped the world of consumerism. Modern consumers easily comprehend the advantages that digitalization brings them, and their expectations have evolved accordingly. They now expect to gain answers to their queries instantly while having the opportunity to choose from a variety of offers, comparing products, prices, reviews, and portfolios within minutes.

And so, companies need to adapt to the habits of their consumers, taking their customer service and the experience they offer through support to the next level. Social media platforms have helped this transition by offering customers to leave tweets and comments to review products/services. However, this is only a transition phase. And so, a company needs to continue pushing on, creating detailed plans, and streamlining customer processes. Furthermore, companies need to eliminate any inconsistencies and minimize room for error, all to establish a resilient customer support system.

Five key benefits of customer service digitization

Omnichannel interactions with customers

With so many different channels of communication and devices that consumers use, it can prove challenging to keep track of longer correspondences and histories with different customers. With the help of customer service digitization, businesses are able to provide customers with a centralized system that can log and save all data from interactions with customers (via mobile devices, online channels, call centers, etc.) By offering an omnichannel approach to customer service, companies can cover wider areas and help more customers while maintaining satisfaction.

Future-proofing against new regulations

Traditional customer service methods often come down to using overly complex spreadsheets, forms, or checklists. And with each new regulation or procedure, any of these formats become more complex to follow. This becomes particularly vexing when a company repeatedly asks for basic information from customers. Such an approach can have an error rate as high as 70 percent due to human mistakes, which leads to poor customer experience.

With digitization, you can ensure a continuous flow of customer service quality by collecting data and reusing it to fill out new forms and procedures. As a result, you avoid having customers provide you with the same information over and over again. This also allows businesses to focus more on customers and less on regulations.

Time-efficient and productive

By automating the manual customer service processes, a company saves time and resources in the long run. It can use this breathing room to invest more in the innovation of new products and the perfection of existing ones. That means that businesses can maintain their level of customer satisfaction while keeping up with current industry trends and staying ahead of the competition.

Provides a competitive advantage

The bar has been set high when it comes to modern customer experience, and customers know this. With the access we have to digital channels, we can cross-compare our user experience with various companies and apps. And so, businesses that wish to move beyond the confines of their niche and competitors need to look for new ways to improve the experience of their customers’ interaction with their business. By pioneering a step toward customer service digitization, you present your business as an innovative force in your industry. This grants you a competitive advantage against those companies that are slow to adapt to trends and changes.

Drastically improved customer experience

A business risks losing customers due to poor experience with each additional effort it asks of them. Whether it’s re-submitting forms of personal data, verifying their identity face-to-face, or rescheduling their appointments, it all has an impact. However, with digitization, all this becomes much simpler and easier to control. Clients have the freedom to maintain and update their own accounts and data. By using identity and verification software, you no longer need to schedule face-to-face consultations. And you can even save time with the use of eSignature capabilities.

5 ways to improve customer experience with technology

With such a variety of technological improvements and innovations available, it can be difficult to plan out where to start once you decide to focus on customer service digitization. And so, you need to establish a strong foundation on which to focus your investments and expectations. Here are the five fundamental objectives to focus on when searching for the proper software solution for your business:

#1: Establishing an organized online database that you can easily access

The ability to store all relevant information online is simple yet crucial for taking customer experience to the next level. When you provide customers with access to useful data for their most common issues and requirements, they are less likely to have to bother even contacting you directly. Instead, they can find an answer to most of their queries directly and within minutes. As a result, the business saves time for both customers and employees while lowering operational costs in the process. And you have examples of this everywhere:

• eCommerce websites now offer accounts for regular customers, giving them an insight into their purchase history and the option to save contact information, delivery and billing addresses, and even credit card information.
• Businesses that offer services provide customers with FAQ sections and separate pages for each of the services they offer, helping customers understand what they’re getting.
• Software providers and IT companies offer live chat support as a typical format of customer service digitization. Why bother calling or emailing when you can have a technician resolve your problem with a few simple clicks and messages?

#2: Implementing automation to boost overall performance

The very notion of automation still raises debates filled with doubt and skepticism but the approach itself has grown greatly. Technological innovations have evolved the stereotypical chatbots with rudimentary functionality to intelligent and adaptable AI bots that can cover a wide range of services. In fact, modern studies show that a majority of consumers today prefer interacting with computer-based applications for support because of:

• 24/7 availability;
• faster response rate;
• professionalism;
• objectivity;
• follow-up processes;
• efficiency, etc.

#3: Creating custom-tailored content for users

No matter how detached modern consumers are due to digitalization, they still prefer a personalized approach to answering their needs. In truth, with such distancing from direct contact with company representatives, customers have a more expressed desire for receiving any signs of personalization.

With the use of cookies and heatmaps, search engines are able to provide customers with recommended websites based on their search history. In the same manner, eCommerce websites can recommend products that are related to the ones that customers bought or were researching. All this serves to further boost the appeal of improving customer experience through the use of customer service digitization and integration.

#4: Collecting more relevant information about target audiences

With digitalization on the rise, online businesses now have access to more data about customers than ever before. Companies collect, track, analyze, and use that data to improve their offers and target more closely to home. It offers valuable insights into the behavior of consumers, how they respond to different campaigns and content, what they find more appealing to purchase, etc. The only important thing to remember is that a business should always inform customers about such processes.

Modern consumers understand how customer service digitization and the introduction of various software solutions gather data about their preferences. And most people trust this to be a good practice, as it offers them more personalized choices when it comes to their buying decisions. The only important thing here is to assure customers that the data you gather is not shared with third parties, and is only being used for the purpose of improving their customer experience with your business.

5. Providing more value to customers

No matter how much technology a business assimilates, priorities mustn’t change. The customers should still remain the focal point, with the goal of using different technological innovations to improve the value you provide customers with. Nobody is interested in a collection of apps that serve no purpose other than to boost the portfolio of a company. If you truly want to improve customer experience with technology, then concentrate on key processes that engage and help customers. By improving those processes with customer service digitization, you inevitably take steps toward increasing customer experience and the overall number of customers you have.

What customers really want from digitalization:

Adaptability

The perspective of customers shifts based on external factors such as demographics, age, gender, nationality, etc. For example, millennials are more likely to engage with companies via online accounts, live chats, and social media networks. On the other hand, older generations will focus more on traditional channels of directly contacting customer service via phone or email. If you limit your customer service options, you also limit the satisfaction you can get from a specific audience. Enrich your digital strategy with customer preferences in interacting with businesses and boost their overall experience with your company.

Speedy resolution

Modern consumers want to spend as little time as possible before getting the solutions they need. With the rise of social media platforms and business listing websites, it has become more difficult for businesses to hide negative reviews and easier for customers to express them publicly. That is why companies need to focus on achieving first-call resolutions by learning from experiences and introducing viable scenarios. Customer service digitization can help a business introduce different methods of communication and access to customer data and history, all to provide sufficient information necessary to resolve an issue on the spot, even if the matter gets escalated further.

Convenience

It all comes down to coming up with a win-win scenario for the customers as well as your business. And this is a convenient scenario that digitization brings to the table. However, to achieve this, a company needs to consider the perspective of the customer first. Not all people have the convenience of reaching out with their queries during the day. Some can only do it after work or during the night. And the systematic solutions you have in place need to adapt to such timetables. Considering and incorporating the customer experience into the system’s design can help simplify what you’re trying to achieve.

The opinion of consumers is final

The realistic truth is that global digitalization is changing the customer experience, so much so that companies are forced to adapt in order to survive. At the end of the day, a business still relies on the opinion of its customers. Even with digitalization, it’s still all about the customer.

We depend on the needs and expectations of customers and how they view the aspect of digitization. And so long as we use modern technological solutions to identify and answer the needs of customers, the benefits of customer service digitization are endless. A business can secure its position among competitors through the exceptional customer experience it provides, becoming a well-established and strong brand in the process.

• If you wish to take that next step in customer relationship management solutions, give our team a call today and learn how to adapt to the needs of the market.