How to deliver the best digital experience to your customers?

When we hear or talk about customer service, we naturally tend to associate customer care or the experience delivered to clients with the human interactions that there is between the client and the business. But the reality on what customer service includes is quite different.

When you take the whole customer journey with all its different touchpoints between the clients and the business, the human interactions actually represent a very small percentage.

In fact, the customer journey actually starts from the moment a potential client starts to hear about your business and it finishes from the last interaction the business has with the client.

Based on this, the touchpoints your clients can have with your business can go from your social media posts to your website or anything else your clients / potential clients see about your business.

Is customer service important when you have almost no human interactions with your customers?

So if I would have to answer if yes or no I think that customer service is important for businesses providing their offer almost entirely digitally with few to no human interactions, my answer would definitely be yes.

Actually, a huge part of my target audience and customers are digital platforms or e-commerce businesses especially because of the fact that you need to build the best journey for your customers so they can get the full benefits of what you provide even though everything is done virtually or automated.

Make all the processes on the customer side easy to follow and well communicated

If you do not have members of your team being in charge of delivering and managing the customer experience by interacting with customers, you need to make sure that this experience is being delivered by itself.

The quality of your experience will therefore be based on how you are building it beforehand by including every part of the customer journey from beginning to end:

• Clear messaging on offer including solutions, benefits or outcome
• Clear and easy website performance
• Clear way of setting expectations digitally
• Clear explanation to customers of the steps to follow
• Clear clients’ related processes
• All the different touchpoints set clearly and
• Customer related automations
• Clear processes and ways to get in touch in terms of customer issues

I could definitely add much more to this list, as the main reason why customer service is important when you are doing almost everything digitally, is because you need to be fully aware of what you want your customer journey to be. And plan it accordingly in every detail. So you can make sure that your customers receive a great experience digitally throughout all the different touchpoints you have been building beforehand.

Once every detail of the customer’s “digital journey” is planned, you need to focus on one of the most important aspect of this journey: how will it be perceived and experienced on the customer’s side. Very simple, if you don’t spend time to fully understand your customers’ perspective of the digital experience they are getting by “seeing with their eyes” how their experience it, you will not make it smooth and enjoyable for them.

This is how sometimes with very big and successful companies, you may have very complicated processes for very simple issues or requests which make your journey totally chaotic and frustrating. And this is what we will talk about in the next part.

Have set processes around predictable customer issues

When you are working on your customer’s digital experience, planning the predictable is very important. But what is equally important is planning the unpredictable. From customer issues to unexpected customer’s requests or unpredictable external factor stepping in, it is crucial to ensure that you have set processes and human resources ready for these kind of situations.

You need to start by asking yourself what are your most common customer issues or what are the unexpected situations that can occur and how you are planning to tell your customers what step they should follow in case it happens. From there, you need to make sure that your processes and human resources follow along.

We also never really know what types of customers we have once we start dealing with them. And it is exactly the same when your customers starting their digital journey with your business. You may have a challenging customer who wants to talk to someone, complain or make a point about something or expect things he/she shouldn’t expect. And the question to ask yourself is “what processes do I have around this so I can handle this type of situation?”

Either you have clear explanations of what to do in terms of issues on your onboarding instructions, or you have a chat box available on your website or a contact number to call in case of issues, it is crucial to ensure that it is again, clear from your client’s end what steps to follow. From there, you need to make sure you are being spot on once you have this human interaction with them and know exactly what to do to help them. But we will talk about this a bit more in detail right below.

Be outstanding on the few real interactions with your customers

This is a fact, if you have fewer human interactions with your customers, you will be 10 times more judge on these interactions. So you better be spot on. And it starts with great customer service skills, great customer care deliver and strong ability to build a relationship of trust with customers on few interactions (but also on the trust you have been able to build digitally before this interaction occurs).

I could expand a lot on this part and talk on all the things I am regularly training employees on but the ?main takeaway I could give would be to make sure that your team is perfectly trained and aware on what to do in case of specific issues and show the best attitude when handling customers. If this part doesn’t go well, you will unfortunately be remembered on that negative part, even if you have created the best digital experience for your customers.

As I often say, a customer issue is an opportunity to show how much you care for your customers and really go above and beyond their expectations. But it can definitely have the opposite impact if you don’t do so, mainly with fewer interactions as previously mentioned. If as a business you are able to show quick problem solving and reactivity to customer issues, you will simply wow them and being continuity to an amazing experience they had until the issue. It will definitely make you stand out as a business and may be what your clients will remember.

For instance, a client is designing and ordering on your website a specific product with their own logo and upon delivery, the design is not done as it should. When the customer contact you via your group chat during the hours you already made them aware of beforehand, you ask for one picture proof of it. While keeping your customer constantly/regularly informed and updated, you then have set processes to either:

• Issue refund accordingly right after receiving the proof and give them options on what to do
• Re-arrange a new delivery for them of the correctly designed product that has been set as a priority delivery

Clear, simple, straight to the point and well managed with great customer care. The cherry on the cake comes from a customer issue indeed. And your approach to customer issues is now the thing they may like the most about your business.

Getting the best out of your automations

Setting the right automations is key in order to make sure that your customer journey is as smooth as possible. But automations cannot only be about making things simple for your clients or for your business. Automations also need to be about personalizing the service.

Something I hate about automations, is when you try to call a number for something you need to talk to someone about, and when you call it, you feel like everything is done to find a way to not get you to talk to someone. We’ve all been through that. During that call, you will have to select 6 different options up to the latest one to finally wait a long period to get someone on the line as “the line is busy at the moment” (though you know it always say that for every call). You will go through all this to finally end up talking to someone who is not the right one who tells you that you need to call another number.

This is exactly what I call bad use of automations. As not only you are making things more complicated for your clients, but you are definitely not providing the best experience to your customers with these automations nor generating any trust from them. You definitely focus on making your life easier as a business and even worse, it is obvious from your client’s end that it is the case.

Automations definitely need to be about the customer experience and not only your internal organization or your productivity. For instance, a great use of automations can be a chat box on the bottom right-hand side of your website where you can enquire about anything as a client. You will talk to a computer at first who ask you accurate questions to either:

• Give you the right solution / steps to follow
• Get you to talk to someone specialised to help you with your problem on that same chat

This is what I call amazing use of automations. As yes, you are having a set structure of automations that works well for you and your internal organization, but also that works perfectly for your clients and provide them with the best experience. In a way, setting a great strategy around your automations is about associating these automations to how you handle successfully your customer issues and make the few human interactions outstanding as explained above.

Something else I would strongly recommend you do, is to use these automations to manage your customer expectations successfully as well as a sharing the important information you definitely want your clients to be aware of. These information can be about the time needed to reply to an email/enquiry or the delivery time of a specific product, or even something specific regarding your terms and conditions. Either it is an automatic reply, specific information shared where a form is submitted or set reminders to your customers part of your newsletter, using your automations to make the information as accessible as possible for your clients while keeping them up to date is key.

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