In the recent past, digital was seen as an optional part of “business as usual.”
Currently, however, digital has become so integral to the way people work, communicate, and interact, that it’s no longer an optional part of “business as usual,” but rather its defining feature.
As Lindsey Anderson and Irving Wladawsky-Berger argue in their Harvard Business Review article, The 4 Things It Takes to Succeed in a Digital Economy, “The tail has become the dog. Digital is not just part of the economy — it is the economy.”
The in digital customer care — also known as e-care — is being driven by customers who are already using digital platforms to research and review products and, depending on their experience with these products, to publicly praise or criticize them via social media.
E-care involves the transition from service models based almost entirely on manned service counters and traditionally run call centers with live representatives, to digital services via web-based user accounts, social networks, mobile phone, the Internet, and increasingly automated contact centers.
At KOVA, we’ve got extensive experience in guiding businesses in the transition to fully operational digital contact centers. The advantages of adopting e-care are worth the effort, and practically every consumer-facing industry that requires extensive customer-relationship management — from financial services to consumer electronics to healthcare and utilities — can benefit.
Digital customer service also provides superior customer satisfaction.
Research from Deloitte found that “76% of telecommunications customers are satisfied with a customer service journey that is fully digital, compared with 57% satisfaction for interactions through traditional channels. When you consider that migration to e-care can, in our experience, reduce call volumes and operating expenses by 25 to 30 percent, its benefits seem obvious.”
But, Deloitte cautions, “These statistics mask the fact that few purchase journeys or service interactions are handled entirely digitally: while 41% of service interactions with telecommunications companies begin on an e-care platform, just 15% are digital from start to finish.”
These statistics alone demonstrate that a truly digital contact center isn’t just a matter of stacking digital options on top of a non-digital foundation of service offerings or product choices. Just as a major product launch or strategic initiative must be executed only with intensive planning and cross-organizational coordination and support, so too must the transition from traditional channels to digital customer care be approached as an incremental, multi-stage undertaking.
What follows are some strategic considerations and guidelines for this transitional process:
Auditing your customer service requests through speech analytics can also be illuminating. One company found that although there were a 2,000 different reasons for customers to contact a call center, only 60 problems (a mere 3% of the total) comprised 65% percent of call volume and 55% of costs. Further, just 15 of these 60 problems had an online solution. The implications for this were that designing online solutions for the remaining 45 priority issues could potentially cut the company’s call volume and costs by as much as half.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post!