How To Make Customer Service More Digital
Today’s world is a digital world, with almost everything happen online and over digital platforms, and any modern company wishing to keep up with the competition and succeed in its own industry has to be ready to embrace this change and adapt to the needs of today’s customers.
In the past, your customer service team might spend a lot of time dealing with customers in-person or over-the-phone.
However, these days, a lot of customer contact happens via digital channels like SMS messaging, live chat windows, or instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
There are a lot of benefits to making use of these new and emerging platforms.
They can save you a lot of time and resources in the long run, as well as building customer relations and brand loyalty too, but you have to have the right approach.
Here are some smart ways to raise your digital customer service game.
6 Tips on How To Make Customer Service More Digital
1. Don’t Limit Yourself to Just One Channel
There are many different forms of digital customer service, from simple SMS messages and alerts delivered right to your customers’ phones to live chat windows and app-based messaging services.
Each one of these channels can allow you to connect with more of your customers, so it’s worth investing in more than just one of them.
Whilst this sounds easy in theory, implementing multiple channels does not come without difficulties in how to manage them.
We have plenty of resources on CX Central to help all look at engaging either a specialist technology provider or consultant to assist.
2. Consistency Is Key
If you’re going to make use of multiple digital channels, you need to ensure that you’re offering a consistent level of quality and service across each one.
If a customer contacts your team via live chat and later sends a message via email, they should be able to expect the same standards of support each time.
This is especially important if you plan on working with chatbots.
Contact Centres and customer service teams often work in silos, e.g. a team that handles phone calls is different from the team handling live chat who is different again from the team handling emails and so on.
And whilst customer expectations can and are different for each channel (customers expect an almost instant response on live chat but expect a day for email for example), neglecting either channel can cause issues.
What often tends to happen is customers will try multiple channels in order to seek the quickest resolution that can create additional workload so being clear and transparent around response times per channel can help.
3. Simple and Seamless
The whole advantage of digital customer support is that it’s supposed to be a lot easier and more convenient for your customers to simply type out a quick message on their computer or phone than spend time waiting on hold.
It’s all about convenience, so you need to make sure that your digital channels are very easy to access and simple to contact, with easily accessible live chat windows and email addresses for your customers.
How many times have you visited a website for example and wanted to reach out to the company but found it literally impossible to find a live chat option let alone a phone number?
4. Get Feedback and Always Strive to Be Better
No matter how hard you try, your customer support service will never be perfect.
Many college paper texts have been written on this subject, but one of the key themes they always come back to is the importance of trying to improve.
Don’t settle for second best.
Make use of services and feedback forms at the end of digital interactions with your customers to get their views on what works and what needs improvement.
Use metrics such as Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score and more.
But here is the most important part.
Act on that feedback.
No matter what tool or methodology you use to capture customer feedback, it’s pointless if you do nothing with it.
Say thanks to your customers for taking the time to provide feedback and then tell them what you are going to change in order to address it.
There are millions of companies using feedback forms, surveys and so on and only a small percentage actually do anything with it.
Don’t be like them.
5. Keep Up with Trends
There are many ways you can improve your customer support delivery, but in order to keep up with the latest trends and techniques, you have to be willing to put in the work.
Make use of online resources related to your industry and the customer support world at large to learn about new changes and embrace those that suit your business.
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6. Make the Bridge Between Voice and Chat
A great way to improve your customer support offering is to give customers more choices about how they want to contact you.
For example, if a customer is waiting in line to speak over a voice call with one of your agents, but the centre is quite busy at the time, you could send out an automated message asking if the customer would prefer to talk over chat instead of waiting.
Sure, multichannel and omnichannel can be more difficult to master however there is no question it’s a benefit to your customers.
So there you have it, 6 quick tips on how to make customer service more digital!
