The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused businesses, including contact centers, to modify their operations and strategy. In such difficult circumstances, it is critical to provide high-quality service and an unrivaled Digital Experience to clients. In a previous piece, we discussed the value of customer service during conflict. Today, we’ll discuss the Digital Experience at contact centers: how to make it memorable, leave a positive impression on customers, and maintain customer loyalty.
What is Digital Experience?
In the context of contact centers, digital experience refers to all of a customer’s contacts with a company via digital channels (live chat on the website, mobile apps, social media, email, etc. This includes everything from initial contact with the website to problem resolution via chatbots or mobile apps.
Why is Digital Experience important in contact centers?
During times of conflict, crisis, and instability, people frequently experience increased stress and anxiety as a result of external events. These feelings might be expressed as mistrust, distrust, and bias toward businesses and their products or services. Contact centers, as the front lines of communication, must address these issues by providing practical needs while also developing emotional bonds and loyalty.
Furthermore, as technology advances, competition increases. Customers today want services that are fast, convenient, and personalized. If your contact center fails to provide a high-quality Digital Experience, you risk losing clients to competitors.
Three key strategies for delivering an outstanding digital Customer Experience
As previously stated, the Digital Experience at contact centers includes client interactions across many communication channels. The ultimate goal is to improve the usability, accessibility, and efficiency of digital products and services. For an exceptional experience, it is critical to ensure that not just the primary target audience, but also potential customers looking for better solutions, are satisfied and engaged. What tactics can help achieve this?
Personalization
First and foremost, service in a contact center must be tailored to the specific demands of each customer. A CRM system is quite important in this regard. Consider calling your mobile operator’s contact center and having the professional welcome you by name, know your plan, last top-up date, and any past concerns you’ve reported. During the conversation or chat, you feel like a VIP customer. It’s a good sensation!
Another example is a predictive contact center analytics. Consider the IVR menu—when you call a contact center and receive a voice menu encouraging you to hit a key that corresponds to your query. Consider a consumer who routinely contacts technical assistance. Why make them listen to the whole menu? Based on past information and their phone number, the system can divert their call to the relevant department.
Understanding context
Contextual digital experience is a style of interaction in which the system knows the context and gives relevant information or functionality at the appropriate time. It’s comparable to being greeted by name at your favorite store or getting movie recommendations from pals based on your recent viewing habits.
One of the most visible instances of contextual digital customer experience is the usage of text and voicebots. These bots, which are based on artificial intelligence, speech processing, and deep learning, are growing more advanced. Sometimes it’s difficult to discern whether you’re speaking with a real person or a virtual agent!
While we all prefer to chat with a real agent, but AI chatbots can already discern context from keywords and even identify emotions. They can also make personalized recommendations depending on your location, time of day, and past interactions. In other words, if you want to give your customers a great Digital Experience, invest in context-aware bots.
Omnichannel and continuity
Omnichannel and continuity in the digital experience imply that a customer’s interactions with a company via many channels should be seamless and continuous. Whether the consumer contacts the company through a website, mobile app, social media, or a call center, they should feel as if they are interacting with a one entity rather than multiple divisions.
Consider when you explain the cause for your request in a text chat. You fill out all of the essential fields, but when you contact a live agent, you must repeat everything. Can this be described as an exceptional experience? The response is, of course, rhetorical. But how can you ensure that a contact center’s Digital Experience remains consistent? This requires:
- A consolidated database that allows for flexible access by operator groups and supervisors.
- Integration of communication channels to ensure seamless customer transfers between them.
- An intelligent client recognition system.
- A system that transfers context from one channel to another.
For example, suppose a customer begins placing an order on a company’s website but has some doubts. They choose to contact a chatbot. The bot, which has access to the customer’s order details, can answer their inquiries and assist in the completion of the order. If the consumer need additional assistance, the chatbot can connect them to a human contact center agent who will already have all of the information about the customer and their order.
Conclusions
Digital customer experience enables organizations to meet customer requests and gain an advantage in a crowded competitive market. Given that more than one-third of customers are willing to cease using products or services after just one negative interaction, businesses must seriously examine the level of service they give. This applies to both in-house and outsourced call centers.
Cloud-based contact centers may collect and organize client information from several channels. When connected into a single platform, support professionals may offer each customer a seamless and tailored digital experience.
In these difficult times of economic and social uncertainty in our country, the Digital Experience is critical to customer loyalty and long-term corporate success. This means that you have no alternative but to provide your customers with digital communication channels while maintaining good service levels. If you find this process too onerous, you can always rely on Global Bilgi’s services, as we know how to create a genuinely excellent digital client experience!
