The Ultimate Guide of Digital Customer Experience

Interaction with customers must be smooth, hassle-free, and convenient. No matter on what platform or channel they are reaching out, they must be well understood and feel valued. And this is what digital customer experience ensures. Let’s talk about what is digital customer experience is, why it is required, benefits, and how to create it.

Customers have gone digital these days. And, this has forced everything to go digital. People go on to various websites to search for products and services. They make purchases and payments online. Plus, they do various other transactions with e-retailers. Seeing this has sped-up customer digitalization, companies are in dire need to provide digital customer experiences. You need to be where your customers are!

Content:

We can define digital customer experience as the total of all online interactions between your customers and your brand. When customers interact with brands, it involves a series of actions. For example, customer interaction may begin with your website or social media page, but it further includes chatbots, messaging apps, mobile apps, and many other virtual touchpoints.

Let's take a look at a Customer Journey –

1. Customer calls on the Toll-Free number.
2. The IVR system guides him to switch to WhatsApp-based self-service or a visual IVR
3. The customer chooses the option and then gets redirected to WhatsApp bot or Visual IVR.
4. The customer gets her issue resolved by the self-service portal or bot. Awesome!
5. Still, need live agent service? Connect with a live chat over WhatsApp or Video call from the Visual IVR

There is numerous such journey for customers right from pre-purchase, purchase to post-purchase activities and most of them are relying upon digital channels.

Covid-19 has brought a tectonic shift in people’s lives and industries. Primarily, it has introduced a tremendous change to the customer journey. Nowadays, people spend a long time on mobiles, computers, and social media platforms. They listen to more and more streaming services and upload or watch content on YouTube or TikTok. Besides, many other factors affect customers’ buying decisions and experience with your brand. These factors include ease of navigation, mobile responsiveness, website speed and aesthetics, quality, language, and so on. The pandemic outbreak has skyrocketed in-home media consumption than ever before and consumers are becoming more digitized. Hence brands need to build a strong customer experience. In short, joyful experiences for customers that spark beautiful emotions will shape brand loyalty and buying patterns more than the products or prices.

Apart from this, Some Other Propelling Reasons are:-

• Over, 67 percent of customers are ready to pay for an enjoyable experience.
• When you develop an emotional connection between your customers and brand, you get a 306 percent higher consumer lifetime value (LTV).
• Besides, a higher percentage of consumers recommend your brand to others.
• In case of issues associated with price or products, customers are 4 times more likely to think about moving to your competitor.

Now the most pertinent question is how we can improve a digital customer experience. What are the tools that can help us provide the best digital customer experience, and how can it benefit your business?

Customers have become digital. They want an immediate response to their queries. If you can meet their demands and solve their queries without taking much time, it will lead you to increase your sales and profit. But you will need to prepare a strategy to improve digital customer experience and equip your business with some tools. In short, take action to adopt tools and technology upgrades.

1. Adopt Technology Upgrades:

Improving digital customer experience is not possible without adopting technological upgrades. It means you have to equip your workforce with the latest tools and technological advancements. Only this will create a well-connected and agile work environment. The covid-19 outbreak has made all enterprises realize that cloud-based solution is the only resort to their various customer-related issues. For example, you can choose the CCaaS software deployment framework, which is very similar to SaaS in which the applications and software live in the cloud.

This cloud-based framework works in the best way for agents, allowing them to continue their work from anywhere in the world. Likewise, Ucaas provides a seamless environment for office-related work. To sum up, these tools offer a seamless collaboration among the teams, help your business processes, and increase productivity. It helps your agents to make informed decisions and brings you incredible customer satisfaction.

2. Use these Tools:

Here’s the recommended list of tools that can help you provide the best digital customer experience:-

i) Chatbots:

A Chatbot is a computer program that reciprocates conversation via text or voice communication.

Chatbots are leveraged with AI-enabled customer support. These can automate resolutions, answer customers’ queries, and transfer chats to live agents when required. Besides, it integrates quickly with web apps and web portals, including payment gateways or CRMs. Chatbots can handle many customers at a time. Above all, you can use chatbots for various departments such as finance, IT, HR, etc.

The advantages of implementing chatbots are enormous like:-

1. Time and money-saving: Agent assistance i.e. 1-1 interaction to every customer query can consume huge time and effort. Also, agents may not be able to provide undivided attention to various queries at the same time. Searching out the right information can be tedious and time-consuming. Moreover, long waiting times in the queue can have a negative effect on the customer experience. A study was done by IBM which indicated, chatbots can save 30% of customer service costs by answering 80% of basic questions and shortening the response time
2. Higher attraction for the current workforce: Gartner assumes 70% of the white-collar workforce uses a chatbot on a daily basis due to chatbot’s ability to simplify a task, manage numerous tasks faster and efficiently
3. Lead Generation: Chatbots help brands to understand their audiences in a better way like their likes and dislikes, the interest in the product and services by actively asking questions to the users and saving all sorts of information about the user in the data repository. A chatbot is also being used as a replacement for lead forms nowadays. If the chatbot integrates with the CRM systems, the new leads can be created automatically in such CRM Software. 

ii) Live Chat:

Adding a live chat feature offers comprehensive support for audio, text, and video-based conversations. Plus, integrating it with different social media platforms like Facebook messenger, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp helps you enrich your customers’ experience with complaint booking, instant ticket management, product demonstration, etc. Live chats give insights about real-time active chat, a record of the chat history including customer information, average chat handling time, transcripts and snapshots, CSAT, etc. The live chat dashboard provides real analytics for your live chat team. For example, you can get the analytics regarding agents logged in, active chats progress, chats in the queue, missed queue, answered chat, and much more.

iii) Help Desk:

The customer service software helps contact centers and businesses manage and organize customer interactions. It is a multi-channel platform that helps customers to register their queries and complaints using SMS, voice call, email, social media, or bot. The helpdesk solution helps businesses to monitor all customers’ complaints and queries proactively, making sure that none goes unattended. Above all, it is available over the cloud and also you can install it on the premises.

iv) Self-Service:

Self-Service helps users find the answers to their queries themselves. Here, they don’t need to reach out to the agents. Instead, IVR is used by businesses to automate responses for customers. Plus, IVR helps in offering a personalized experience and reducing costs on human resources. Also, it provides multiple responses to multiple callers at the same time. Besides, IVR allows companies to handle high call volumes easily. A smart way of call deflections is to provide visual IVR – which has all relevant menus and opens up on the customer’s smartphone. With a high level of Visual IVR containment ratio (>70%), it’s a win-win for both brands and customers.

3. Offer Omnichannel Support:

Omnichannel support helps to count every interaction, whether it is inbound or outbound. Brands providing omnichannel supports enable their customers to use their preferred channels like WhatsApp, email, social media, mobile apps, or website chat and phone. An omnichannel setup gives support agents access to customer metrics across various communication platforms. It does not matter what platform your customers have interacted with. The support team can easily interact with the customers and know the customer journey.

4. Engage Customers using Video Chats:

Your call agents can engage customers through video chats and elevate the regular chat conversation. Video chats can be done using mobile apps, over web browsers, and also through SMS. When customers use mobile apps for video chats, they can show a faulty part using the rear camera and get the required help to diagnose the problem. CZ’s video call offers screen sharing feature, too. Call agents can use this feature to guide customers on various web-related issues and deploy the solutions immediately.

Above all, its snapshot feature captures the image of the damaged vehicle that can be inserted or escalated into a Ticketing CRM to resolve the issue quickly. Apart from this, customer representatives can use its multi-party conference system to invite supervisors or experts over the video call. It helps in making the overall discussion more fruitful and gives quick results. Here, the text chat within the video call goes on smoothly, creating no interruption to the call.

The world is becoming increasingly digital. With this, the need to pair the latest digital technologies with concrete marketing strategies has also become the biggest demand of this era. When you deliver optimum digital customer experience, it benefits your business hugely. Here’s how digital customer experience benefits businesses:-

1. Enhancing Digital Customer Experience Cuts Cost:

Using omnichannel support (voice, video, email, web, chat, social channels, and SMS) and other digital customer experience tools such as AI-based chatbots, Visual IVR, social messaging bots, helps you in cutting costs. It helps your call agents to become more productive and reduce stress on them. As a result, you face a very low attrition rate that helps reduce spending. We know that hiring new employees is always expensive. Besides, when you deliver superior service and reduce the time customers spend with your call agents on phone, it helps to keep your business lean and profitable. Also digital services like live chats (a live chat agent can take 4 to 6 concurrent chats), it's far more cost-effective compared to voice agents (can handle one customer at a time).

2. Saves Time:

Your time is invaluable and so are your customers and employees. With digital customer experience comes automation – like self-service, knowledge base, bots, etc. With meaningful automation, a lot of time is saved. No need to make them wait in the queue and create more annoying customers.

3. Makes Your Business Flexible and Scalable:

Tools to improve digital customer experience help your business to meet the ever-changing needs of customers. Plus, it helps in providing a better quality of service. Scalable service means your customers can access various services putting no burden on agents. In short, all these help your business to grow and earn more profit.

Digital customer experience is all about creating a modern and efficient environment in your business. Creating such an environment that can lead your business to growth requires you to equip your business with the latest digital tools such as chatbots, live chat, IVR, video chat, omnichannel support, etc. Digital Customer Experience will become more relevant as the digital-first or mobile-first millennials become the future customers.