Before the problem is at your doorstep
The purpose of digitization is to drive growth, increase revenue and boost customer satisfaction by being an integral part of the customer journey while meeting the customer's expectations. But at the same time, digitization is about remembering your commitment to your employees and facilitating the creation of new career opportunities. Something that many companies miss is the customer insight that goes hand in hand with the digitization process. With a digitized customer service department, you are able to
collect more relevant customer insight, which you can apply to improve the customer experience and help your staff better serve your customers. This may include insight into your customers’ behavior before and after the purchase, whether the customer has been in contact with you before and who the customer is.
Why are these insights so important? Relevant, real-time insight can help you develop the customer experience. For example, good insight allows you to see what works (and what doesn’t) in ad campaigns and product launches. Something a customer perceives to be incredibly irritating may be seen by your product development team as a product feature or only a minor problem. But the customers who experience this problem can be so critical that they share the experience with their friends and family, and even worse, they may end their relationship with your company. It is safe to say that if 100 customers contact customer service with a problem, 100 to 1,000 times more customers are experiencing the same problem. Therefore, it is often too late to show reports from a marketing campaign after the campaign is over.
The right, real-time insights can help your customer service staff to better resolve a customer request at the first point of contact, or maybe with no contact at all or a combination of the two. Digitization also increases your reach and allows your customer service to be more present with your customers – not just when a problem arises, but throughout the entire customer journey. Anyone with even a little experience in digital marketing knows that reach is everything, especially relevant reach. The contacts that your
customer service team have with potential customers and existing customers fall into the category of highly relevant reach. Digitization allows you to increase your reach and also increases the chances of improving the customer experience and creating loyalty, and this equates to more sales and increased revenue.
Establish contact early on in the customer journey
Digitizing your customer service allows you to better understand your users' journeys. All potential customers go through a journey that begins long before the first contact with customer service. Digital service enables you to get closer to the customer than you can with a traditional phone call. It is important to remember that a specific customer can have several different customer journeys. For example, a customer may have a problem that needs to be solved, but the same customer may also need
help getting started with one of your products or services. This may also present an opportunity for additional sales once the problem is resolved, or at least help to turn your customer into a loyal customer, which will increase the customer’s longevity or level of consumption. But before you get there, you first need to establish contact with the customer at an earlier stage of the journey so you can resolve the problem more quickly.
Another advantage of gaining a better understanding of your customer at an earlier stage in their journey is that you can gather valuable information, such as how the potential customer found your website so that you can interact with them on a personal level. For example, did the potential customer find their way to your website via a web page that rates various competing companies? In that case, it could be a good idea to communicate with that particular potential customer via a chat feature, initiating the
conversation with, “We’re glad you found us! I’d be happy to tell you why our products are the best on the market.”
For those of you running e-commerce operations, it is important to adapt your customer service approach accordingly so that you can offer the best experience possible for your particular clientele.
Don't lose contact!
An important tactic that most companies forget is to follow up with their customers after a purchase. A really good customer experience isn’t just about the purchase itself. In order to build customer loyalty, it is important to think about how you can develop the journey further and maintain contact. Many companies make the mistake of viewing their customer service function only as a problem solver. But a modern organization uses its customer service team not only to solve problems but to build relationships with its customers after a purchase has been made. In order to get the most out of your customer service resources, it is essential to understand the importance of becoming an integral part of the customer journey, as a company. From start to finish (and afterwards, in a continuous cycle).
Digitizing your customer service entails much more than just expanding your channels of communication to include chat, messenger and social media. Today's customers use many different types of screens and expect your services to be adapted accordingly. This provides companies with the opportunity to exceed their customers’ expectations, but also presents the risk of complete failure. After all, your customers don’t necessarily care about which channels your company offers, they simply want to use your product or service without encountering problems. Therefore, it is important to remain focused on how you can help your customer continue to use your product or service without the need for unnecessary contact with the customer service team. If a customer would like to contact you, you need to consider which channel will be the most effective to carry out that dialogue, both for you and the customer.
Would you like to learn more about how Transcom Digital helps our partners with their customer journeys? Please feel free to contact me directly, Tomas Yangbyn, so that I can tell you more about our approach, Customer adaptation – ground zero, information mapping and channel shaping.
tomas.yangbyn@transcom.com