A Guide to Digital Transformation in Customer Support
In the business world, the necessity of successful digitization is becoming unavoidable, and there may be no area in which digital transformation is as important as customer support.
Consumers have questions and problems, and they want them addressed immediately and on their own schedules. As a result, lots of companies are pouring resources into their digital transformation projects. Unfortunately, those efforts often fail due to a lack of planning or lack of employee buy-in.
That doesn’t have to be the case for your business.
This article will introduce the basics of digital transformation in customer support and provide step-by-step guidelines for implementing the right technology that will help you streamline customer communication.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into areas of a business that were previously non-digital.
It encompasses all of the ways businesses integrate technology into everything they do in the digital age and helps businesses focus on customer needs by streamlining haphazardly organized information, business processes, and data collection.
These transformations are driven by the emergence of new and useful technologies, the demands of customers, and external factors outside the scope of the business.
One of those external, environmental factors was and is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the course of the ongoing pandemic, many businesses have had to (and still have to) learn how to digitize their in-person systems on the fly.
Doing this successfully requires a great deal of flexibility and organization.
If the broadness of all of this seems overwhelming, it might be because it is. The majority of digital transformation initiatives fail mostly when businesses don’t clearly define their goals or understand their context.1
Ultimately, all aspects of a digital transformation journey are focused on customer interaction.
Businesses want to reach their customers easily. They want to create a seamless experience. Integrating new and emerging technologies is a key part of this process.
What is Digital Transformation in Customer Support?
Even if the customer experience is kept in mind through all aspects of a digital transformation effort, it is in customer support where the rubber most obviously hits the road. Customer support is where a business has its best chance to succeed with customer satisfaction. It is where you take a consumer with a problem and turn them into a satisfied customer.
The benefits of a single good customer support interaction impact customer loyalty in ways that ripple through the entirety of a business.
In customer support, digital transformation involves incorporating tools that enable you to converse with customers online, automate processes and unify customer data.
Here’s a closer look at how digital transformation has been driven and facilitated in customer support:
Technology innovation and upgradation
Keeping track of customer complaints using pen and paper at a physical helpdesk or even using email was not scalable and often caused things to go haywire.
Plus, call centers needed a more systematic and easy-to-use solution since traditional call center solutions were often on-premise. Phone support also offered less than ideal experiences for both agents and customers – for the former as it constrained productivity, and for the latter as the format forced extremely long wait times.
Adding to this, was the emergence of online channels of communication such as live chat and social media that seemed to offer easier, faster, and more accessible solutions. All of these factors collectively paved the way for businesses to switch to cloud-based helpdesk solutions and customer service software.
Evolving customer behavior
Customers are becoming more demanding over time. Since February of 2020, 68% of US customer service leaders saw greater customer expectations.*
Customers have started to gravitate towards digital-first communication since they prefer the ease of interacting through online channels.
60% of leaders saw more churn over that same period, meaning those customers were increasingly opting to abandon one business for another that might better meet their needs.
Clearly, these numbers point to changes in what people want. The question for businesses is how to respond to those demands.
Changing external and environmental factors
Businesses need to change their functions, processes, and models in order to keep up with peers or competitors in the industry who were quick to adapt.
For instance, businesses transitioned to a remote support model to continue engaging with customers and assisting them throughout the ongoing pandemic.
Why is Digital Transformation So Important in Customer Support?
Customer support is an increasingly important part of any business. Over the past year, 57% of customer service leaders have actually seen their total available budgets increase compared to 2019.*
At the same time, many businesses are reporting reduced staffing in customer support. So how can a reduced staff maintain — and hopefully improve — their effectiveness?
This is where digital transformation strategy, in all of its applications, becomes so important.
Digital transformation overall is the way of the future for customer support in so many ways. The ability to digitize customer support processes, knowledge bases, and feedback, means — on a large scale — that businesses can better understand themselves.
The high failure rate of digital transformation efforts is evidence enough that businesses know they need to start these processes.
A digital business might set up an AI chatbot to handle simple customer requests quickly. They might also create quick and easy ways for customer support reps to access answers to common questions that customers are asking.
These possibilities sound great for the customer experience, but, as always, the devil is in the details.
Has the chatbot been programmed in a way that actually helps customer engagement, or is it just annoying and frustrating your customers? Is the information employees are getting correct, or are they winging it as best they can?
Making it easier for your customer support staff to deliver a positive customer experience is more important than ever.
How to Implement Digital Transformation in Your Customer Support
So, you want to start moving toward a digital initiative in your business.
This section will give you a step-by-step guide to implementing digital transformation strategies in your business’s customer support apparatus.
Step 1: Identify Customer Support Problems and Articulate Goals
Before you can come up with a holistic digital transformation strategy, you need to know what you hope to accomplish. Identifying problems and articulating goals will help get you there.
The first thing you need to do is figure out what your business needs.
Where are you wasting energy and time? What is frustrating to your customers? In what ways is your customer support team unable to get information out to customers in a beneficial way?
For example, let’s say your current wait times for customer support are too long on average. The result is that you are likely losing customers or at least creating a worse customer journey.
Now that you’ve identified a problem and articulated a goal, what can you do about it?
You want to make those wait times shorter. You want to give customers who just need a quick and simple answer to a question the opportunity to get that information with little-to-no wait.
But how do you go about making this possible? Let’s find out.
Step 2: Identify What You Can Digitize
You can start by getting organized about the types of information your customers need.
In the example above, you have identified a digitization opportunity where customers should be able to find answers to common queries by themselves, the first step is to identify what those questions are – and then offer them access in a medium they are comfortable with – whether that’s an FAQ portal, a simple web widget or an AI-enabled chatbot.
This self-service portal also has immense benefits to your internal team as well – allowing them instant and up-to-date information, allowing them to get more done, with less effort. Another way to digitize the answering of common questions is through canned responses – templates of predetermined answers to common questions that allow agents to quickly address these, instead of having to manually type out the same answers each time.
Similarly, identify ways to digitize other processes that do not require manual effort and would benefit from automation, such as ticket assignment, follow-ups, feedback management, etc. Identifying this type of information will make it much easier for you to begin your digital innovation.
Step 3: Identify What Not to Digitize
While the popularity of contactless customer support continues to grow, 63% of customers are happy to talk to a bot as long as they can move to a human if needed.2
Even as the demands of consumers become more digitally driven, there will be some share of the population that needs solutions that are more old school, and some situations that will always require human intervention.
Identifying common customer concerns that you can’t solve without human connection and building that necessity into your plan will make you more likely to achieve a successful digital transformation.
Ideally, these various channels will be so seamlessly integrated that your customers won’t even realize how much easier things have gotten!
Step 4: Identify the Tools That Will Help You Digitize Your Customer Support
Now that you have a clear sense of what kind of digital transformation strategy you hope to accomplish, you will need the right tools to help you implement that change into your digital channels.
- Freshdesk provides customizable customer support tools that help businesses move swiftly and confidently through the process of digital transformation. For instance, Freshdesk empowers businesses to move from traditional telephony to digital channels such as email, and social media, as well as mobile-first messaging channels like WhatsApp and Apple Business Chat that customers today use. The best part is that Freshdesk enables businesses to manage conversations across channels right from a single screen as opposed to jumping between tools.
- Additionally, Freshdesk also helps you automate tasks, launch self-service, offer proactive support, and monitor reports — key aspects of digital transformation that improve agent productivity and customer experience.
- Freddy AI, Freshdesk’s artificial intelligence platform, allows a business to create a customer-facing chatbot that can drastically improve the customer experience. Just as importantly, Freddy AI has powerful agent-facing tools. The agent-facing AI allows customer support agents to quickly triage customers, find information from their internal knowledge base, and introduce time-saving processes for common requests.
Your customer support strategy should be tailored to the needs of your business and your customers. So it’s important that the customer support tools you choose enable you to integrate with other applications that you’re using for customer relationship management, billing, etc. For instance, the Freshdesk Marketplace hosts 650+ applications that you can integrate with to completely digitize your support workflows.
Step 5: Implement Digital Tools and Evaluate Their Effectiveness
An organized customer service software will make it easier for your business to complete its customer service digital process transformation.
Once you’ve got that part done, you’ll want to be able to measure operational efficiency on your own terms.
A good customer service software will provide reporting and analytics tools to make this process manageable and helpful, providing useful data.
For instance, the reports on Freshdesk aren’t just designed to let you know what’s happening. They are designed to help drill down on issues and make improvements to your business operations constantly.
Part of the advantage of digital transformation, after all, is the way it makes it easier to continue adapting in the long term.
Real-World Example of a Customer Support Team that Went Digital
This can all seem a little abstract, possibly, but the real-world impacts can be astonishing.
Posti is the main Finnish service delivering mail and parcels in Finland.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Posti became overwhelmed by businesses submitting requests for payment deferrals.
Suddenly, the logjam meant it was taking customers up to 45 minutes to submit a request. And obviously, this was leading to frustrations for Posti’s customers and Posti’s customer service reps.
Posti wanted to ease the stress on their customers — it’s already stressful enough to be applying for a payment deferral in the first place.
They also wanted to do more than just survive the pandemic. This was an opportunity to do some digital transformation that could give the company a competitive advantage down the road.
So, Posti used Freshdesk’s Freddy AI to create a smart and intuitive self-service bot to help out their customer service reps.
They integrated this self-service bot into a dedicated page for payment deferrals. This allowed customers to get personalized service just by providing their business ID.
The results pretty much speak for themselves: Posti found a 98% reduction in customer wait times.
All of this saved time for customers meant saved time for Posti’s team, too. Saved time means you can start using that time to solve bigger problems than the ones right in front of you.
When COVID hit businesses, we immediately started looking for tools and mechanisms for automating the process of requesting delayed payment for corporate customers of Posti. We chose to work with Freshworks because not only they were able to work with our tight timelines but also meet our expectations of the total cost of ownership, proof of concept, and turnaround time.
– Jari Viljasaari, Business Manager of Digital Solutions, Posti
How is AI Leading Digital Transformation in Customer Support?
Customer support interactions, when successful, leave customers feeling satisfied. They’ve had their questions answered and in doing so got help solving their problems.
For businesses then, the goal is to streamline the customer experience on the customer-facing side. Of course, this often means streamlining the agent-facing side of the process as well.
- One way to streamline the customer experience is to save your customers time.
As discussed, 63% of customers are happy to talk to a bot as long as they can move to a human easily if needed.3
Evidence suggests that in the near future 85% of customer interactions will be completed without a human agent.4
- Another way to streamline the customer experience is to provide more correct information. Digital transformations enable you to deploy a bot effortlessly using no-code bot builders and make things easier for your customers.
Just as importantly, new technology can give agents easier, more reliable access to information.
With information now digitized, it’s going to be far simpler for your customer support department to answer your customers’ questions efficiently with the help of an agent-facing chatbot. It’s common to think of these processes as only customer-facing.
- Agent-facing AI has other benefits too — streamlining access to the internal knowledge base, triaging incoming customer issues, assisting agents with troubleshooting — that can make life much easier for your business’s contact center.
What all of this means is that as customers are becoming more demanding, they are also becoming more open to the possibility of meeting those demands with previously unavailable technologies.
Conclusion
In customer service, as we’ve seen, digital transformation success involves incorporating tools involving automation and the gathering of data in order to streamline customer service processes.
The bottom line is that your customers already expect streamlined, digital processes when they come to you for support.
As we move further into a digital world, those expectations will only become more extreme. The time to start your digital transformation is now.
Though digital transformation can seem daunting, businesses can use a step-by-step approach to move toward a successful transformation of their customer service business process.
This approach becomes endlessly simpler when using tools like the ones provided by Freshdesk, including Freddy AI.
Sources:
* – https://www.freshworks.com/the-new-cx-mandate/
1 – https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-how-of-transformation#
2 – https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/12/16/100-stats-on-digital-transformation-and-customer-experience/?sh=5ba4f1163bf3
3 – https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/chatbot-statistics/#gref
4 – https://chatbotslife.com/chatbot-2019-trends-and-stats-with-insider-reports-fb71697deee4
