Digital Customer Experience: Tips

How can companies improve the digital customer experience? Covid-19 pandemic has shown service providers the importance of not only embracing, but also adapting and innovating digital solutions in order to optimize their services and stay ahead in the game. While many have started to offer digital solutions, improving the digital customer experience has turned out to be a real challenge when things are still quite new.

How to improve customer experience with digital solutions:
Providing digital services that are accessible, integrated and smooth has become essential in today's world. In this context, offering services in the digital sphere is not an option anymore, but a necessity. This means that service providers need to adapt and accommodate customers with digital solutions if they wish to keep them.

The need for an efficient omnichannel customer journey management system becomes more important than ever when you aim to give a seamless customer experience across both digital and physical platforms.

An article by McKinsey, Elevating customer experience excellence in the next normal, states that the emerging trends are of increased traffic in online channels, and an increased focus on health and safety. What does this mean for service providers?

How to improve customer experience with digital solutions

Below are a few essential things to consider when you want to optimize digital solutions to improve customer experience. 

Provide digital services that are accessible, integrated and seamless

Providing services that are accessible and integrated become essential in today's world. In this context, offering services in the digital sphere is not an option anymore, but a necessity. This means that service providers need to adapt and accommodate customers with digital solutions if they wish to keep them.

The need for omnichannel customer journey management becomes more important than ever when you aim to give a seamless customer experience across both digital and physical platforms.

Use virtual solutions to ensure health and safety requirements are met

Health and safety will likely remain as the top priority next year. But how do you ensure this when your business relies on remaining closely connected to your customers?

It all comes back to the previous point: provide options that would allow customers to get access to you even when it’s not physically feasible. Digital solutions are here to stay.

In the customer journey management area, here are a couple of examples of things you can do to ensure the health and safety for customers and staff:

• Use mobile tickets instead of physical ones – replace the physical with virtual queuing. This frees up your waiting area as customers can wait remotely and monitor their place in the queue with a mobile ticket
• Deliver your service remotely where possible – offer a virtual customer meeting for your appointment if you don’t need a face-to-face interaction for serve your customers

You can read this article to learn more about how to optimize virtual queuing solutions to aid social distancing.

Make the most of the data and insights to improve your services

The move to digital channels means that service providers have more data and insights on their customers, which is easily accessible for analysis, making decisions, and improving your services. Invest in technology with powerful analytical tools that allows you to harness data of your customer journey and day-to-day operations, for example a customer journey solutions with a business intelligence tools that collect data from each touchpoints and give you key statistics and reports.

Ask for customer feedback

Data collection with digital or virtual touchpoints is easier, but direct customer feedback is still the most valuable insights for your services you can get. Set up an online customer feedback questionnaire that customers automatically receive after the service is completed, and you can use it with other input to analyze for improvement.

Tips to improve digital customer experience

A report by KPMG, Customer experience in the new reality, looks into how customer behavior, expectations, and experience have shifted in the light of COVID-19, and state that there are six pillars of experience excellence, including personalization and minimizing customer effort. These are indeed, the key things to improve digital customer experience.

Here are a few tips to make sure you don’t sacrifice customer experience when employing digital solutions.

Personalize your services

Digital solutions come with many advantages, but it is harder to build connections online. Showing that you understand the customer specific needs, knowing who they are from their customer history, and make them feel valued and in control will contribute a lot to increasing customer experience. Leverage the data you have to be well-informed when a customer starts their journey.

Minimize customer effort

Customers are now used to quick services that don’t require much of their time and effort. That is why it’s important to reduce any obstacles in the customer journey. A few examples of what service providers can do to improve this are:

• Minimize waiting times
• Give regular and clear updates to customers
• Manage queues and service efficiently
• Provide several options to access your services so customers can choose the one that’s most convenient for them

Create seamless processes

There’s potential for gaps and friction when services are offered across physical and digital platforms. Missed or unsynchronized data and miscommunication are some of the common problems. Make sure you have omnichannel solutions that could accommodate customer journeys in physical, digital, or a mix of both channels, and allow preservation of information across their whole journey.

Download our virtual queuing guide to learn more about how you can improve digital customer experience.