The quality of digital customer service and ROI are directly proportional. According to Forbes, companies earning $1 billion a year in revenue make an extra $700 million over the next three years by investing in customer experience.
Furthermore, according to Gartner, 52% of the CEOs say digital improvements have led to increased revenue.
We are in the era of customer-centricity, and no business should be unaware of it. Customers, now more than ever, have an active role in their purchase decisions. Thanks to the free-flow of information, hyper-digitalization has made communicating with the customers very easy.
In order to ace your digital customer service, businesses need to adapt to the right digital customer service technologies and invest in useful digital customer service tools.
In this blog, I have listed the 7 most essential and effective technologies you need to deliver a great customer experience online. I have also recommended the best customer service tools for every technology down below for you to get started right away.
1. Email Automation
Research by SendPulse found that automated emails have 4x times more click-through rate (CTR) compared to normally written, traditional emails.
We all know the role artificial intelligence plays in digital customer service.
Email automation is the unison of email and AI, and it is a significant breakthrough in how marketers and businesses connect with their customers and prospects.
Businesses rejoice at being able to communicate and create deeper bonds with people through value-providing emails.
CMOs love the ability to send customized, tailored emails to their targeted audience; in a way, the latter is quickly motivated to act.
Automated business emails are sent upon specific triggers like newsletter subscription, ebook download, shopping cart abandonment, and post-sale. The goal is to deliver an optimum customer experience and have the patrons and customers indulge with your brand and business even more.
Here's an example of how Amazon uses automated emails:
- No coding required to create branded email templates.
- A/B testing to choose better subject lines, CTAs, and more.
- Engagement Analytics to get insights on customers expectation.
2. Co-browsing
Co-browsing is the latest breakthrough in digital customer service. It targets the core needs of customers. In a way, co-browsing is going beyond traditional screen-sharing technology.
Unlike screen sharing here, the agents will be able to control specific aspects of a customer's browser. For instance, an agent can help a customer find the right products and even check out the items for them.
This two-way communication would be carried out with the consent of the customers. The customers will have the choice to share only those parts of their browser they want.
Here's how a co-browse software encrypts sensitive information like a credit card number.
Co-browsing gives customers a very in-person experience online. With co-browsing, businesses can now deliver the same quality of customer experience they would be able to provide offline.
Recommended tool - Acquire Co-browse software
Recommended tool - Acquire Co-browse software
The main features of Acquire's Co-browse are:
- Follows all the recommended safety and compliance guidelines for secure conversations
- Allows for easy integration with other customer support tools like live chat, and video chat
- Acquire is the only solution that provides a mobile SDK offering agents to access co-browsing features even on mobile devices
3. Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Marketing guru, Neil Patel, states that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for better customer experience.
A customer satisfaction survey is a highly rewarding customer experience tactic.
Even before marketing automation was first introduced, businesses understood the importance of customer feedback. So, clipboard surveys were a common practice then.
Thankfully now there is more than one way to know how our customers feel about their business experience. Some of the standard scoring methods to gauge customer satisfaction are:
- Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
- Time To Resolution (TTR)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
Various tools use one or more of these scales to help you create excellent customer satisfaction surveys:
Recommended Tool - SurveyMonkey
The main features of SurveyMonkey are:
- Uses the registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld -- Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
- Allows for multiple surveys across the customer journey
- Easily contextualizes customer feedback data to your CRM for your agents
4. AI-based-conversational chatbots
According to MIT Technology Review, 90 percent of the businesses report faster complaint resolution with chatbots.
Chatbots have leveraged the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to the most in the customer service domain.
They allow businesses to provide digital customer service round-the-clock. It is also easy to integrate chatbots with a company's knowledge-based software, which will help visitors and customers get answers to common questions.
Here's a chatbot integrated with knowledge-base at work:
When customers get answers in a written form through knowledge-base and chatbot integration, they are more likely to trust the brand or business since there will be no doubt of unambiguity in answers.
Recommended tool - Acquire's Chatbot
The main features of Acquire's chatbot are:
- Helps decrease query resolution time and offers answers to FAQs 24/7, also freeing up agents' time
- Automatically routes to live agent for solving a complex query
- Easily integrate with other customer service tools
- No coding required, choose the purpose of your chatbot and customize the desired workflow accordingly
5. Heatmaps and visitors' session recordings
Heatmaps are a creative way to visualize a customer's or visitor's time spent on your website or app. It is a visual representation of data that shows the most popular (hot) in red and unpopular (cold) blue elements of a web page. It does this by recording a visitor's session.
A visitor session is defined by a visitor's activity from the first time he lands on a page until he exits the web site or remains inactive for 30 minutes.
These graphic visualizations allow you to understand what people like most about your website or app -- the most and least engaging parts. This can help you make desired changes to your website to optimize your target audience's digital customer experience.
Recommended tool - Hotjar
The main features of Hotjar are:
- Easy to use because of enhanced user interface
- Allows an organization to manage all the websites it owns from one account
- Effectively translates customer data into actionable insights
6. A digital experience management platform
Digital Experience Management is an emerging technology that helps businesses deliver on optimum digital customer service.
This enterprise technology is not a single-point solution, and it works across your digital space to offer great customer service.
This technology can be offered by a single tool but is generally a suite of tools working in unison. A digital experience platform provides a space for businesses to:
- optimize business operations for digital space
- deliver seamless and relevant customer experiences across the customer journey
- gather actionable insights into customer behavior
All this, in turn, is critical in developing a robust digital customer experience strategy.
Recommended Tool - Adobe Experience Manager
The main features of Adobe Experience Manager are:
- Automated tools help you ensure your content is consistent and relevant throughout your digital space.
- Quickly source, adapt and deliver your marketing assets across audiences and channels
- Offers seamless communication with customers through response forms across the customer journey
7. A Ticketing System
Ticketing systems are the most important ways to enhance service. A ticketing system is a management tool that allows customer service representatives processes and catalogs customer service requests.
These tools create an effective system to capture, manage, track, and prioritize customer issues' status in an organized and highly collaborative manner.
Tickets, also known as cases or issues, need to be properly stored alongside relevant user information. The ticketing system allows for that and provides agents to deal with customer queries efficiently in less time, delivering the best customer experience to the people.
Recommended Tool - Zendesk
The main features of Zendesk are:
- Automated ticketing system powered by bots to speed up ticket resolution times and freeing agents
- Efficiently routes automatically to live agents from bots to solve complex queries
- Allows agents to talk with multiple clients simultaneously
- Offers holistic reporting functionality and competent ticketing
Conclusion
The American Express 2017 customer service barometer says, "Americans tell an average of 15 people about a poor service experience, versus the 11 people they'll tell about a good experience."
Furthermore, according to newvoicemedia.com, "U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service."
Now that you know the tools and technologies available to better your customer experience, we hope they will help you gain better traction with brand awareness, conversions, better ROI, and greater customer satisfaction.