Why Digital Customer Service is Important for the Growth of the Business

In this digital era, companies need to change their business models. This change is mainly driven by customers. Customer’s demands are rising day by day. To meet those demands companies need to offer an exceptional customer experience to the customers. Good customer experience will produce more customers, more sales, and more loyalty. Businesses are focusing on digital customer experience to achieve business goals.

By providing digital customer service, a business can significantly reduce costs and deliver flawless and more satisfying customer experiences.

What is a digital customer experience?

Digital customer experience is the sum of interaction between a customer and the brand that took place on digital platforms like website, mobile, desktop, iPad or tablets, in short, any platform that facilitate the customers to have a real-time conversation with the brand.

Why Digital Customer Service?

McKinsey and Company, the global management consulting firm conducted a study which concluded that e-care is the future of customer service. According to the survey, by digitizing customer service, customer satisfaction can be increased by 33% and costs can be cut back by 25 - 35%.

Source: McKinsey

The more digital the journey is the higher will be customer satisfaction.

“We cannot promote our brands as responsive, caring and customer-focused while ignoring too many of our customers’ needs and complaints in social media.” – Augie Ray

Digital technology has changed customers’ habits. Customers expect to get what they want almost exactly the moment they need it. Customers are more aware and can compare the prices of the products or can check reviews within seconds in this digital world.

Turning digital customer service functions not just merely means creating a company’s Twitter or Facebook account where customers can tweet complaints or leave review/rating to you. To offer good customer experience businesses need to implement a good customer experience strategy as per the business requirements. With proper planning, streamline customer processes and remove inconsistencies and errors and build strong customer support.

Imagine the way you shop. Today, people are using multiple devices as part of that process. Browsing, research, reading reviews, comparing, asking peers for the recommendation, and then you buy something. You may have queries related to the products, you may have problems, and you may need support.

Source: Nuance

How can digital customer service improve your customer experience?

Although the medium has changed, however, the message hasn’t— customer service is all about resolving issues for the customer. Today the only difference is that companies need to be available across all digital channels to boost customer experience and service.

Digital customer service has turned into a fully realized marketing channel. Earlier, customer service meant working with customers in a physical location to deliver the best experience possible.

But today customer service include texting customers, website chat boxes, answering multiple phone lines, website user experience, sales presentations, being on social media, listings, Co-browsing—the list goes on and on. Successful digital customer service demands several cornerstones.

Co-browsing is the best tool to provide top-notch digital customer service to the customers. With the help of co-browsing, customer service representatives can see and interact with the customer’s screen. Thus, with this customers query can be solved quickly and effectively.

As customers can see what actually customer service reps are doing they feel safe and this builds trust with the customers.  Stats show that co-browsing reduces call handling time by 14%. This improves the customer experience and reduces the rate of abandoned shopping carts.

Build Relationships. Engage Your Customers. Increase Efficiency and Revenue.

“One customer well taken care of could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.” – Jim Rohn

Since last many years, the most preferred way for customers to solve their problems or getting an answer to their question regarding the purchase of anything has been by calling the customer service department of the company and talking to a live customer support representative.

Though it still remains a hugely preferred mode, both customers and businesses can significantly enjoy and get the advantage of online assistance instead of over the traditional phone.

Number speaks— Live chat with 92% customer satisfaction leads the way over email, telephone, and social media support. 63% of customers prefer returning to a website that offers live chat as compared to the one that doesn't.

If done in the correct way, adding a digital customer service or customer care solutions that let customers get their queries answered, receive instant support or resolve any issues having with your company, will not just make for enhanced service experience, but also cut back the overall costs.

Live chat simply means communicating or chatting with the customers in real-time. Live chat support reduces response times and operational costs. Chat support is merely over half of the actual call center operation cost.

Increase Customer Satisfaction

“Here is a powerful yet simple rule: Always give people more than they expect to get.” – Nelson Boswell

With the advancements in technologies, people now can shop online using smartphones, laptops, etc. at any time of the day or night no matter it is Sunday or Xmas.

Getting quick assistance at that time may not be viable for a small company and making existing or prospective customer wait for time can actually sour their experience.

So, what’s the solution?

The answer is— digitalization. If a business or brand offers online customer support, things can get much better, the customer or visitor can use it to get their queries answered and find solutions faster.

According to research performed by McKinsey concluded that integrating digital customer service journey leads to 76% customer satisfaction.

The most important features expected by an effective digital customer support experience are—

• Easy navigation
• Clear and easy to understand information
• Easy and quick resolution

So, How Can You Productively Expedite and Digitalize Your Customer Service?

“If you do things well, and you do what customers actually want, they will figure it out.” — Jeff Bezos

If you really want to differentiate your business and enhance the customer experience, it’s time to let your customer access to on-demand support. It is important to make sure your customers are getting their requirements addressed as swiftly as possible. Instead of picking up calls, replying to long customer questions, it is time to switch to advanced customer support— live chat. Here are a handful of ways business and customers can benefit from live chat support.

• Let’s customers multitask
• Proactive outreach
• Know customer pain points
• Improve customer loyalty and satisfaction
• Get access to report and analysis
• Real-time convenience to customers
• Higher sales, conversions and average order values
• Provide chat logs for proof of contact and transparency
• 24*7 customer service
• And much more!

According to a study, over 90% of customers find live chat helpful. Seeing ‘live chat’ button strengthen their confidence as they know they can get instant help whenever needed.

Digital customer service best practices

Unify customer communication across multiple touch-points

When you digitalize customer interaction - it may happen that, a customer who had contacted you on social media is now willing to converse through a video call. In order to accommodate customer need across different communication channels, the business has to offer multiple communication touch points to the customers.

When you offer a facility like this, the agents have to shift between different channels to address customer at their individual touch-points, in the process, they might lose the context of the conversation.

Once you unify conversations in one customer communication platform, your brand can view the entire conversations in a single view, helping you to offer a contextual and consistent service to the end customer.

Innovate to offer a frictionless interaction process

Often companies who adopt service digitalization fails to leverage modern tools that can facilitate virtual communication between them and the customers. For example, one of our client, an insurance company successfully implemented live chat to cut down on the claim approval process and cross-sell service to customers using digital service.

Clearly define SLA and your service standards

The industry you belong may vary but regardless of the industry type, you need to develop clear service standards to ensure your service meets the business requirements of the clients.

Incorporating SLAs at every aspect of your service delivery makes things crystal clear between the client and the company.

Availability of support agent - Let your customer know what they can expect in terms of your availability. Like some of the services you be might be offered only during specific hours, while you might be ready to extend your support hours for premium customers.

Performance standards -  Set service level benchmarks so you and your customer can measure the performance of your staff. Set resolution time, mention minimum response time like standard response time benchmark set for live chat is 48 seconds while that of an Email is 1 hour. Set standards for solution delivery, so everything can be measured and monitored.

A reminder – remembering the soul!

If you don’t make it easy and quick, you lose your customers and prospects. The easier and quicker you make it, the more customers you will win. Acquire can help your company to digital the customer service to get maximum output. A better-run business with more customers means a bigger market share no matter which industry you belong to!