How To Provide Great Customer Service In The Digital Age?

What do customers want? And how can you offer extraordinary customer service in the digital age? There are already numerous studies that deal with these topics.

In this article, we will discuss the most important findings and provide you some tips on how to improve your customer service in the digital age.

 

 

4 tips for outstanding customer service in the digital age

During the analysis of various study results, we noticed 4 areas that are worth taking a closer look at.

 

Quickness & Accessibility

Speed is an important criterion for satisfied customers. On average, customers are willing to wait ten minutes before expecting an answer (Hubspot – 2018). Therefore, efficient processes are mandatory in order to be able to process many customer inquiries within a short time.

A lot of good tools are already out there to support your customer service and make processes more efficient. For example, chatbots on Facebook or your own website can guarantee constant availability. They can answer standard user queries around the clock. If necessary, they can forward them to a human employee or provide information when a human customer service employee will be available. This guarantees that the company can be contacted 24/7 and at the same time reduces the workload for your customer service team.

If you aren’t ready for a chatbot, a live chat or a combination of both can be a great option to provide real-time customer service.

 

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User friendliness

In the digital age, customers are accustomed to reaching businesses on multiple channels. The choice of the channel often depends on the type of request: For a consultation, 78.7 percent would prefer a personal consultation. For administrative reasons (57.1 percent) and obtaining standard information (62.2 percent), digital channels are preferred (Pidas – 2017).  Of course, the target group of your company also plays an important role. This means you need to offer channels that are relevant to your target group and make it as easy as possible for the user to contact you.

Another important factor for user-friendliness is the availability of the information discussed with customer service. In the case of an e-mail, for example, this can be a copy of the inquiry. In the case of a live chat, the entire conversation can be made available to the customer by e-mail afterwards.

 

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Individuality

A survey conducted by the customer service platform Glady came to the conclusion that 59 percent of customers consider it more important to get an individual answer to their questions than to get their problem solved as quickly as possible (Glady 2018). To make this possible, you need to make sure to know your customers and their previous contact points with your company.

A good CRM can help to collect all relevant data about your customers in one place and to make communication as personal as possible. For example, existing information does not have to be retrieved again. Customer service or chatbots can use this information to make the conversation much more personal. In addition, personalized vouchers or special offers can be sent to customers that are tailored to their preferences. This is, for example, a great surprise on the customers’ birthday.

 

Relevance & Consistency

Gladly’s study also concludes that 71 percent of customers want a consistent user experience (Gladly – 2018). As mentioned earlier, a CRM system can collect user data. Thus, it can help to communicate with the user across multiple channels.

However, cross-channel communication is only one part to achieve consistency. The information passed on to the users should also be consistent and relevant. For this, it is necessary that your customer service staff is trained in the best possible way and provides documents that describe how customer inquiries are handled.