Providing flexible communication channels is key to retain and grow customers

As millennials enter the workforce and customer groups, offering digital communication channels is a necessity

Digital CX is the experience you provide to your customers over modern digital channels of communications. While telephony was the only synchronous channel and emails were the preferred asynchronous channel in the past, new channels like chat, social media and SMS have redefined the standard and demand from younger employee and customer base. The next generation of customers/consumers rate the overall experience of dealing with an organisation based on digital channels they are able to communicate with organisations.

At TeleApps, we have been helping hundreds of organisations with their CX strategy and technology. Implementing digital channels is not just about the supporting technology. The working culture, operations, reporting and management need to be refined to adopt to the digital channels. We assist organisations with this overall transformation both from technology and operational perspective.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES (CX) Digital

With more and more younger generation starting to interact with organisations, they are more comfortable and prefer dealing with digital interactions rather than face-to-face or voice. At TeleApps, we have been assisting organisations with their digital interaction journey over a decade. We can assist you with these interaction channels irrespective of whether you have a call/contact centre setup.

Email

Email is probably the first digital channel in terms of customer interaction handling. Many organisations consider email as an old form of communication and hence doesn’t encourage it. But, email based communication can be greatly beneficial for your organisation and your customers because of its offline nature. In your organisation, emails can improve employee utilisation and increase customer satisfaction. From a customer’s perspective, it allows them to send their request and move on to other things rather than waiting in the queue for a person.

Chat

Instant messaging or Chat is considered as near-real-time mode of interaction. This means, both your customer and your staff can work on other things while interacting on chat. It is not like voice channel where you can’t not respond or be quite for more than 2 or 3 seconds. Especially with younger customers, they would prefer chat interaction anytime over voice or email. So, every organisation should seriously consider enabling chat based interaction from their website if they don’t do it already.

Social Media

Social media could mean various applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. Again, with younger customers who are always on various social media applications and pages, they prefer to interact with organisation using their preferred social media application. Social Media based interaction could be greatly beneficial as it is not near-real-time like chat but not offline like email either. But, if the interactions are not on private conversation, care needs to be taken as the interaction with your customer will be visible to others as well.

SMS

Unlike other digital channels, SMS should not be used for all types of interactions as it is not practical for the customer or your staff to type long messages on SMS The SMS channel is perfect for simple question/query which involves responses in less than or equal to 5 words. For example, if the customer could send “Account balance” in SMS and your solution could reply back with their account balance, this interaction is easiest to be had on SMS compared to any other channel. So, care needs to be taken on designing the types of situations where SMS channel is used. SMS channel is great for sending alerts, reminders, confirmation and quick offers to customers.

Video

While Video based interaction has become common in the personal life, it has not taken off yet in the company-customer interactions. However, it could be a very powerful tool as it is as good as walking to a branch to have a face to face interaction. Except, your customers don’t need to travel all the way to a branch. The human emotions can be expressed much easily and it will be a private conversation at the convenience of your office and customer from their home or work.

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