I love great fashion and always look forward to the seasonal reveal of upcoming trends as the latest designs hit the runway. There’s always a standout, predominant color that stylists will enthusiastically refer to as the “new black.” With contact center technology, I’m also just as intrigued by the latest trends in always-on digital communication.

Evolving technology means that customers have more choices, and companies have new ways to engage. In this day and age, not connecting to your customers digitally and based on their preferences is akin to tight-rolling your jeans. It may have been cool 25 years ago only because we didn’t know better. But like that “little black dress,” the tried-and-true voice channel stands the test of time. More than 50% of customer interactions still occur on the phone, according to the 2017 Dimension Data CX Benchmarking Report. The key to getting the best out of digital customer service is understanding how to successfully combine it with voice to deliver memorable experiences.

In the on-demand webinar “Getting the Best Out of Your Digital Customer Service,” Art Schoeller from Forrester Research, and Chris Connolly, Vice President, Product Marketing at Genesys, explain how to find the right blend of humans and machines to achieve business results in a phased approach.

Customer Journeys Aren’t One Size Fits All
Although consumers increasingly turn to self-service channels for the simple stuff like paying a bill or checking an account balance, they still want to call someone when they need to escalate an issue or have a complex question. In other words, there’s not always a substitute for talking to a real person.

In the soon-to-be-released Genesys survey “Customers on Customer Service 2019,” 75% of consumers said that a human provides the most effective customer service, but 76% also want the option to quickly do things themselves online. This only emphasizes the need to serve your customers how they want to be served in any channel. In the webinar, Art highlights several approaches to maximize success.

  1. Leverage customer journey analytics
    With each new way to communicate, customer journeys become increasingly challenging to track and understand. Through analytics, you can measure customer journeys and predict outcomes. Understanding how to effectively deliver digital customer service now requires the ability to capture data across all channels and use it to proactively connect with your customers.
  2. Understand why customers switch channels
    Improving customer experience also means taking journey analytics to the next level by breaking it down by intent and digging into why customers are shifting from one way of communicating to another. Customers predominately choose self-service first. However, understanding why they move from digital to voice helps identify opportunities to improve self-service and the overall experience.
  3. When they go silent, know why
    It can be challenging to capture data about someone who moves from a website to the phone without the proper contact center software. By storing information about a customer’s intention at any moment in time, you can begin to map out where their customer journey begins and ends regardless of how they connect with you. You can also use communication technologies, such as web callback or a WebRTC browser-based voice call, to pass precious data from one channel to the other to seamlessly continue the conversation.

Great Customer Experience Never Goes Out of Style
Like a perfect pair of jeans, exceptional customer service always looks good. Increasingly, this means understanding how customers are moving through processes, how they deviate from where you want and what you can do to improve their journeys. By gaining these insights, you can stand out from the crowd by delivering the expertly tailored experiences that keep customers coming back for more.

Watch the on-demand webinar “Getting the Best Out of Your Digital Customer Service Investment” and learn more best practices and tools for making the most of your digital customer service interactions.