What is digital customer service — and how does understanding the definition, history, and evolution of serving customers through digital channels help organizations clarify what they're building and why it requires different strategies and capabilities than traditional phone-based service?
Digital customer service definition.
Simply put, digital customer service is the provision of customer support through digital channels such as email, chat, text (SMS), social media, and messaging. Customers seek support from organizations for a multitude of reasons including checking on order status, complaining about products, or canceling credit cards. Digital customer service allows them to do this using their smartphone, tablet or computer. It essentially eliminates the need (ideally) for a phone call.
Even though a phone call isn't involved, that doesn't mean an agent isn't part of the interaction. Email and chat, two of the most commonly used digital channels, still rely heavily on agent support, although innovations such as chatbots are automating some of the tasks agents perform. If a customer really doesn't want to interact with an agent (hey, we've all been there!), they can use self-service digital channels like a company's mobile app or website. Digital customer service offers options.
What do consumers think of digital customer service?
In general, consumers are positive about digital customer service, although there's a wide range of satisfaction and adoption levels among individual digital channels. For example, chat and email have high usage rates, high satisfaction scores, and are among consumers' most preferred service channels. On the other end of the spectrum, social media and virtual assistants on mobile phones have low adoption and the lowest satisfaction scores among all channels.
The factors that appear to be driving digital customer service satisfaction levels are convenience, speed of issue resolution, and a low level of effort required on the customer's part. No surprises there, but the lesson is that not all digital channels are equal in how they deliver those benefits. Yet. Some of them are still in the very early stages of their life cycles.
How should businesses move forward with implementing digital customer service?
First, organizations need to determine which digital channels are right for them and their customers. Don't shy away from newer channels but also don't bite off more than you can chew. Businesses also need to implement the right technical platform - one that supports multiple digital channels, includes omnichannel abilities, provides a unified agent desktop, and is flexible enough to accommodate future needs. And it's important to manage the effort holistically so that digital customer service is fully integrated into the overall service delivery model.
Offering digital customer service is now a "must have" for businesses. Organizations need to meet customers where they are, which means going digital.
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NiCE can help with all your digital customer service needs.
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. Omnichannel routing, support of up to 30 channels, robust workforce management capabilities, and a best-in-class unified agent desktop make CXone uniquely suited to help organizations provide an exceptional digital customer experience. Learn more about what NiCE can do for you.
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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