Digital customer support: Deliver personalized customer experiences
What is digital customer support?
Digital customer support (DCS) describes the brand and customer interactions that take place through digital channels such as email, a text messaging channel, live chat, or social media.
Traditional channels for customer service involved dealing with customers in person or handling long phone support calls in call centers, which often ended up in feelings of frustration for both parties involved.
DCS empowers consumers with the ability to interact seamlessly with brands across multiple channels.
Why digitize customer service?
Today’s digital world has changed consumer habits and expectations. In the age of digital transformation, customers care about getting the information they want, when they want it.
What’s more, customers are becoming increasingly market savvy and possess the digital know-how to compare prices, check reviews, ask for recommendations, and more, across multiple devices in a matter of seconds.
Why your business needs digital transformation
Today, businesses and organizations must meet customers’ needs throughout the customer journey. This means providing effective and efficient customer service anytime and anywhere, and ensuring that the customer can pick up their conversation with you where they left it.
By leveraging the power of a digital customer service strategy, brands can ensure they’re providing memorable and personalized support, which promotes customer satisfaction and retention. By reducing response times and improving agent efficiency, businesses can achieve their goals and build trust among their customer base.
Benefits of digital customer support
DCS enables businesses to:
- Offer customers multi-channel, real-time support.
- Provide customers with a convenient experience through easy-to-navigate, intuitive support channels across multiple platforms.
- Empower agents with the digital service solutions, automation tools, and data they need to effectively resolve customer inquiries efficiently and effectively.
- Save on the costs of a traditional call center with a cloud contact center solution that integrates different applications, databases, and channels allowing agents to manage interactions across various platforms.
- Increase customer satisfaction rates with a highly intuitive digital service journey that’s personalized for customer success.
What are digital interactions?
Digital interactions refer to the interactions that take place between customers and businesses across various digital platforms. These include desktop, mobile devices, tablets, phones, and more. Digital interactions provide valuable insights into customer behavior and enable businesses to provide a seamless CX through a unified agent that keeps customers happy, loyal, and engaged.
How digital interactions improve customer experience
Incorporating support across multiple digital channels into your service strategy leads to improved customer satisfaction rates.
By integrating omnichannel support systems into your business strategy, your customers are more likely to continue on their journey with your brand rather than taking their business elsewhere.
As a business, you can leverage the data from various customer interactions across platforms and use it to inform your future DCS strategy. You can also improve CX with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, chatbots, and more.
How can digital customer service be improved?
DCS is constantly evolving and adapting to innovations in technology and shifts in consumer trends. Improving your digital customer services requires you to frequently evaluate your strategy and its performance by tracking customer service channel metrics.
Tips on how to improve customer service strategy to increase customer satisfaction
Provide a unified experience
Be available across multiple devices so that customers can contact you with a text message one day, and converse through a video chat the next. This enables agents to provide consistent service by ensuring they always have access to a particular customer’s journey and context on which to base interactions.
Consider automation, AI, and self-service tools
These kinds of tools can quickly diagnose problems and offer swift solutions to customers, thus freeing up agents to handle more complex queries. If the problem is too complicated for the tools to handle, they can pass the data to a human agent who can then process the request. The best tools of this kind can manage customer conversations, assign them to agents, and deliver automated messages that respond to certain triggers.
Use a customer service platform
A great customer service platform can improve the efficiency of your customer service team hugely. This kind of system integrates multiple touchpoints, allowing for seamless data transfers and customer care across the board. It also provides agents with a big picture view of customer engagement and allows them to complete actions from a single, easy-to-navigate interface.
How to choose the best customer service platform
When it comes to choosing the best platform for customer service, there are a few boxes you’ll need to tick:
- Has a simple, intuitive interface
- Easy to integrate into your existing tech infrastructure
- Offers help desk functionality
- Provides personalized customer experiences and data
- Supports multiple channels
- Scalable to your business needs
What are the 3 types of customer service?
Phone and email support
Traditional businesses realized the potential of phones and email to improve customer service long ago. However, in comparison to support technologies offered today, this is simply not enough.
Today, it’s important for support via these channels to be efficient. That’s why businesses are investing in all-in-one contact centers that allow agents to switch between different customer communication tools without losing track of vital data and details. When integrated with powerful automated tools (IVR, call recording, etc.) agents can use phone and email support to provide a seamless service experience.
Other digital channels: Live chat messaging and social media
Live chat is a tool that is continually gaining traction in the world of DCS. It gives consumers the ability to interact with brands in real-time, providing instant support. Chat tools offer personalized customer service assistance, so the customer feels like they are talking to a live representative. However, it’s a much more cost-effective solution than phone or email support.
What’s more, live chat solutions have evolved to incorporate asynchronous messaging apps or platforms like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, so that users can contact each other when it suits them best. Rather than awaiting an immediate response, a user can send a message and continue with unrelated tasks, and the receiver can respond at a time that’s convenient for them.
Video calls and webinars are some functionalities offered by live chat solutions, which allow businesses to build trust and offer immediate, effective customer support. What’s more, live chat is one of the most effective support methods today, as it goes hand-in-hand with support services for customers over social media, desktop, or mobile app.
Self-service solutions and content
Self-service solutions allow you to take your customer support to the next level, empowering customers to find solutions on their own and at their pace results in reduced customer effort. This kind of customer service uses chatbots, FAQs, webinars, knowledge base articles, a resource library, and more. All this allows customers to take matters into their own hands.
Why are digital customer experiences important?
Although the landscape for digital customer experience is constantly changing, its purpose remains the same: to resolve issues for customers.
As digitized technology continues to transform the way we communicate and consume, businesses must ensure they’re keeping up with shifts in digital customer experience trends. It’s the only way to provide exceptional omnichannel customer support that’s in line with customer expectations and needs.
Start delivering exceptional customer experiences through digital customer support. Reach out to our Sales team for a demo and a quote.