Image credits: Shutterstock
Today’s customers want to interact with brands using the same tools they enjoy for personal communication. As customers rely less on voice communication and more on messaging, social applications, and other mobile apps, brands have quickly realized they need to adopt these channels if they expect to build strong brand loyalty.
That’s why it’s so critical for brands to build new digital avenues to communicate with their customers. Companies that deliver rich, personalized, and consistent customer experiences across all channels, particularly digital ones, have the inside track to grow market share and revenue.
Here are 5 mistakes to avoid when implementing a digital customer care strategy and solutions to overcome them.
1- Responding to the same person on multiple channels
If you’re unable to detect multiple identities as the same user, agents spend more time resolving service issues, increasing operating costs and reducing productivity. It’s critical to build a process that merges social identities and automatically identifies the best channels to answer customer inquiries, preferably meeting customers on their channel of choice. Map inquiries from multiple customer profiles to a single user identity that groups requests on a single ticket.
2- Bouncing customers from agent to agent
Customers want to receive consistent answers to their inquiries on all channels, without sacrificing quality of service. Organize agent teams by skill set rather than by channel to avoid frustrations and avoid redirecting customers. As a result, you’ll be able to provide a consistent experience across channels, and each team can reply to customers on the channel in which they started the conversation.
3- Leaving a chatbot by itself
Despite chatbots’ ability to deliver instant replies, they will never have all the answers to customer questions. Define a precise scope of action for your chatbot. Enable collaboration between chatbots and agents by allowing the bot to hand over the interaction to an agent to maintain the best customer experience possible. Ensure the handover from bot to human occurs on the platform the agent is already using to offer a seamless transition to the customer.
Image credits: Shutterstock
4- Applying voice processes to digital channels
Processes differ from voice to digital. Think about the criteria you’ll use to route and prioritize messages (e.g., the topic of the message, language, keywords that indicate sensitivity, and customer status [VIP, for example]). Take into account the nuances of each channel; the same message sent via email won’t translate on Twitter due to character limitations.
5- Making your customers wait
Seasonality in sales cycles, product launches, holiday schedules, etc. can greatly impact your ability to respond to customers. Look for solutions that help monitor key metrics, such as average handling time and first-contact resolution rate. Agents need specific tools, such as reply assistants, knowledge databases, and even spell check, to reduce their handling times. Track analytics by team, agent, topic, and source to discover and understand the cause of repeated requests, so you can solve problems and allocate resources more easily, especially during unpredictable traffic peaks.
Following these tips will help you deliver an omni-digital customer engagement strategy to reach customers on all the channels they love today, as well as those they’ll use in the future.
To learn more, discover RingCentral’s Ebook “How to Build a Modern Digital Customer Service Strategy: 10 Real-World Insights for B2C Leaders”
