What are the digital customer service channels organizations need to support — and how do live chat, AI chatbots, email, social media, messaging apps, SMS, and web self-service each differ in customer expectations, interaction design, and staffing requirements in ways that matter for building an effective channel strategy?
Adding digital customer service channels to the mix
Digital customer service channels offer diverse options for helping consumers, ranging from high touch to completely self-service. Customers value choice and the wide breadth of digital channel options provides them a lot to choose from.
If you're a business currently exploring digital customer service channel options, you're probably already supporting one digital channel - your website. Customers will frequently self-serve with the information on websites, including store hours, return instructions, and FAQs. Every time a customer can resolve an issue on their own represents an avoided call and likely a satisfied customer.
Along with websites, email support is one of the oldest digital customer service channels, as well as the most frequently used. Forrester reports that 54% of consumers used email in 2018 to receive support. Agent assistance and the ability to include a lot of details are features that appeal to email support users. Our research found that 82% of businesses offer email support, making it almost as common as phone support.
Chat support is also becoming a commonly used digital customer service channel, and it has high satisfaction scores, probably due to the convenience and real-time agent interaction that characterizes chat sessions. A study we conducted in 2018 showed a significant year-over-year increase in the percentage of businesses offering chat support, from 46% in 2017 to 67% the following year. Likewise, consumer adoption increased from 10% to 30% year-over-year.
The fourth channel worth noting in this section is mobile apps. Not every business model lends itself to a mobile app, but for those that do it can be an effective way of providing self-service support. We found that with a 44% satisfaction score, it's one of the highest rated channels.
These four digital customer service channels - websites, email, chat, and mobile apps - are the most mature channels and worth investing in now if business requirements support it.
Digital customer service channels that are gaining ground
There are several newer digital channels that businesses are increasingly adopting but customers aren't widely embracing yet. These include social media, texting, and automated assistants, such as chatbots. As an example of the disconnect, we found that although 59% of companies offer social media support, consumers rate it as one of their least favorite ways to get support.
Emerging digital customer service channels
There are also a couple of digital channels that are in the early stages of their life cycle. Video chat sessions between customers and agents as well as using home assistants like Amazon's Alexa for customer support show promise, but are not widely adopted… yet.
Related resources
How NiCE can help you implement digital customer service channels.
NiCE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our solutions include support of multiple digital channels to provide your customers with the digital-first omnichannel experience they expect and deserve. Find out more about our digital channel capabilities here.
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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