Richard McCrossan explains what organisations should be doing to truly understand their digital customers.
1. Make the response appropriate to the channel
The smartphone may be the hub of today’s customers’ digital life, but the interactive customer experience involves multiple channels – whether it’s voice, web, SMS, chat or social.
It’s not good enough to just provide these channels, the customer experience is unique to whichever channel the customer chooses – what works well on the telephone may not work so well on webchat.
Make the response appropriate to the channel, even co-browse or chat to help customers on their journey to deliver the clicks you are looking for.
Given that most of today’s digital channels are available on a smartphone – email, SMS, voice, webchat – make the most of this device. Mobile marketing can provide a great avenue to attract new customers and reward loyalty.
2. Integrate your channels for a single view of the customer
Integrate the channels so you have a single view of the customer. No customer wants to send an email explaining an issue and then have to call and explain.
Agent desktops are also fast becoming the technology of choice for contact centres – they store all the information from whatever channel about a customer in one place so no customer has to repeat the question as they change channel or agent.
3. Make sure you can see all relevant tweets
So you’ve made the move to social media, now how do you keep on top of it? As a company, you will receive 100s of tweets a day, too many to sift through individually to make sure you provide good customer service to each person.
Social analytics – often available as a cloud offering – will do it all for you, showing you tweets that don’t contain your twitter handle but contain your company name, only showing you tweets that are actionable and relevant, and listing tweets based on selected topics such as “good service” or “poor service”.
4. Offer an assisted service option
Companies that use proven self-service solutions tend to foster a higher rate of first-contact resolution, leading to positive experiences and loyal customers.
It has even been shown that in some situations the majority of customers prefer self-service over calling an agent or sending an email.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) provides one of the quickest self-service options available. But never abandon the customer – you want your customers not just to click through today, but tomorrow and next week – so make sure you offer an assisted service option.
5. Don’t forget about email
Email is long thought to be dwindling in popularity thanks to the abundance of new social media channels and alternative communication channels. But this isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, it has been suggested that email use is actually increasing, thanks to its instant accessibility on the smartphone.
It’s convenient, and while it isn’t necessarily instant, this works in its favour as a channel.
A customer can send and receive emails back at times convenient to them – while agents don’t have to tell a customer “I will find out and give you a call back” or “can you hold the line while I find out the information”.
They can respond to the email as soon as they have the information, increasing first-contact resolution rate.
6. Integrate lead management across different departments
Richard McCrossan
Through all of these channels, it’s essential that lead management is integrated across different departments in the company. Whether that’s the marketing department, sales team, website administrator or the customer service department.
An intelligent workload management system can help companies to make the most of digital interactions and maximise opportunities wherever possible, making each click count.
With thanks to Richard McCrossan at Genesys
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 17th Dec 2014 - Last modified: 12th Dec 2018
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