What are the best practices for digital customer service — and how do channel design, bot-to-agent handoffs, response time standards, personalization, proactive digital engagement, and analytics combine into a framework that produces consistently excellent digital service outcomes?
Three digital customer service best practices to ensure CX success.
If your business hasn't already embraced digital customer service, it's time. Digital support allows your customers to engage with you on their own terms - terms which usually include convenience, speed, and ease of use. And if you already offer digital channels, it's always good to review digital customer service best practices to get new ideas for improving your operations and customer experience. There are always improvements to be made. Why not borrow ideas that make sense?
To get you started, here are 3 digital customer service best practices, based on experience and backed by data:
Optimize for mobile
Over half of internet traffic is from mobile phones, so chances are that your customers will be accessing your digital support channels via their phones. Your company website is one of the most common resources your customers will turn to when trying to self-serve. Display, load times, and search capabilities are all factors that impact the mobile experience. Optimize, or face some serious consequences - 57% of internet users won't recommend a business if their website doesn't work well on their mobile phones. Optimize for mobile and you'll be following a digital customer service best practice.
Protect customer data
With data privacy and security at the forefront of all consumers’ minds, protecting customer data is a critical digital customer service best practice. Communicating private data over the internet introduces an extra element of complexity in the battle against hackers. A Salesforce study found that 73% of consumers indicate that being able to trust companies they do business with is more important than it was a year ago, and to 78% of them, that includes security. Having a strong data security plan is a "must have" when you offer digital support.
Provide an omnichannel experience
No digital customer service best practices list would be complete without mentioning unified omnichannel. Assuming you offer or plan to offer more than one support channel (including phone), they should all be integrated in a unified omnichannel fashion so that you can offer customers seamless experiences as they move across channels. This is a well-beaten drum, but it bears more beating because there's much more work to be done to get to omnichannel bliss. Our consumer and business benchmark studies revealed that 91% of consumers expect omnichannel experiences, yet only 24% of businesses rate themselves as excellent at omnichannel. The beat goes on!
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NiCE knows about digital customer service best practices.
NiCE CXone, the world’s #1 cloud customer experience platform, transforms your call center software – empowering exceptional agent and customer experiences: every channel, every time. CXone was developed with digital customer service best practices in mind so that you can deliver seamless, secure customer experiences in every channel. Find out more about how we'll make sure your customers' data is secure.
Any digital channel
Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels – even if you’re not there yet. How many SMS text messages go to your call center phone number with no response? Who’s trying to find you on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp and not finding you? Now with CXone it is easy to provide digital-first omnichannel service in all the channels your customers expect.
- Personalized digital interactions: deliver native experiences in each of 30+ messaging channels, such as rich media, emojis, and other collaboration tools.
- Simple to Activate: pre-integrated channels make it easy to offer to customers and agents.
- Easy to Say “Yes”: simple packaging removes barriers to offering all channels to customers and agents.
Empowered agents
CXone empowers all your agents to deliver a true digital-first omnichannel customer experience by simultaneously combining all customer interactions in one intelligent inbox across multiple digital channels and voice for agents to select ("pull"), while dynamically prioritizing the most time-sensitive or real-time interactions according to service levels ("push"). All delivered in a single application – complete with full customer context, journey history, and sentiment.
- Single Interface: one inbox for all digital messaging and real-time (voice/chat) channels – retaining native experience of each messaging platform.
- Agents in Control: ‘pulling’ work in natural flow, while dynamic prioritization maintains SLAs – and prevents ‘cherry picking’.
- Customer Card: full customer context, journey and conversation history, plus sentiment.
Holistic management
With CXone, omnichannel interactions are managed holistically, from agents to supervisors and beyond. Integrated workforce optimization, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence across digital and voice interactions ensure complete management across contact center operations.
- Self-Service: native AI-powered chatbot and 20+ DEVone AI bots with seamless elevation to agents.
Intelligent Routing: AI-powered natural language and Predictive Behavioral Routing for voice/chat and digital messaging channels. - Blended Agents: complete quality, coaching, recording, scheduling tools to optimize management and engagement of a true omnichannel team.
- Digital Voice-of-the-Customer: feedback surveys and speech/text analytics that capture, analyze, and drive action on CX insights.
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