While there are some cornerstones of customer service that don’t change much with time, it’s still important to keep up with the changing needs, demands, and preferences of your customers. The digital age has brought unprecedented change to almost every aspect of business, and customer service is no exception. If you want to continue to grow and thrive into the twenty-first century, it’s vital to form a digital customer service strategy and master the tools you’ll need for the job.
What Is Digital Customer Service?
Simply put, digital customer service is merely the digital aspect of all your customer service efforts. This covers things like email support, video chat, chatbots, text messaging, knowledge bases on your website, and more.
Even with brick-and-mortar stores, customers are doing much more of their shopping and buying digitally. Customers will spend time online researching their prospective purchases — reading reviews, watching videos, reading specifications — and even ask questions via digital means before they make a major purpose. It pays to be ready for those questions when they come.
Why Is It Important?
Studies have shown customers are more savvy, well-informed, and demanding than ever before. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it just means customers expect more options when it comes to contacting businesses and getting support. With the changes brought by the pandemic, more and more shoppers are staying home, preferring to use digital means to do their buying and interacting. Many businesses had to shutter their physical operations and go to an all-online model, and that trend may continue even beyond the pandemic.
The reason for this is simple: people are growing more comfortable with digital tools in their lives. Texting is now the dominant means of communication for adults under 50. Younger generations prefer using a smartphone to research and order products rather than going to a physical location.
The secret is to make that process as easy for them as possible. If you give your customers more ways to get in touch and make it easy to get the customer service they need, that can give you an edge over the competition. In order to build a successful digital customer service strategy, it’s important to find and support the digital channels your customers want, and find the tools for the job. For example, if your customers wish there were an online knowledge base where they could search for product information or troubleshooting tips, you can serve them best by putting one into place.
Some common examples of digital customer service include:
- Live video chats or AI chatbots
- A knowledge base so customers can search for their issue
- Customer service through text messaging
- Shared browsing with a customer service representative
Mastering Digital Customer Service
So what are some of the tools you’ll need to really make your digital customer service soar? Here’s a short list.
Live Chat
Not every customer relishes the idea of navigating a phone tree and being put on hold. Live chat is a great way for your customers to get assistance right away, without much wait, and can be installed on your website to make it readily accessible to customers. Live chat is also much better than phone support for providing links to online resources.
Chatbots
While live support has some major advantages, your business may not have the budget or personnel for it. Chatbots can be a great alternative to live support, offering automated replies to customers to help them find answers to questions, updates on their orders, or anything else you program them to provide.
Help Desk Software
One of the keys to great customer service is managing the copious amount of customer service data you’ll gather as part of your everyday business. A good help desk software suite will give you the tools to manage your knowledge base, track and measure your customer service goals, provide a customer service ticketing system that can route, categorize, and tag your tickets, and more.
Customer Feedback
Any business owner worth their salt knows that customer feedback can be pure gold. Whether you collect the information you need through surveys, email, text messages, or social media, you can glean invaluable insights and data from customer feedback.
Mobile Apps
Online ordering for everything from fast food to books and electronics is now commonplace, and many businesses are offering customers the chance to communicate in real-time with customer service. Surveys have shown about half of mobile users prefer using an app to making a phone call or seeking out in-person support. An optimized mobile app could make a huge difference in your customer service strategy.
In general, your digital customer service tools should be able to readily manage and share information between team members and departments, automate processes to save time and money, and (where appropriate) provide metrics that can be analyzed so your customer service team can assess and improve your process.
