Ask any company today whether they have a comprehensive digital strategy, and they’ll likely all tell you “yes.” Whether they actually do have a coherent strategy is anybody’s guess. More often than not, you’ll find a patchwork of half-executed policies drawn up by individuals, departments and teams who seldom communicate with one another. Real, enterprise-wide digital strategies that cover everything from customer support to social media to mobile apps to remote working to marketing and advertising are rare.
A company with a nine-headed digital customer support presence will never know precisely how it’s interacting with customers. If a customer sees a digital promotion and uses a smartphone app to reach out to the marketing department, and later chats with a customer support in the contact center, that customer should feel like he or she is communicating with a single beast. Social media, of course, sits at the center of this digital morass, according to a recent blog post by Dave Borrelli writing for the Huffington Post (News - Alert).
“Now, more than ever, it's critical to connect with customers wherever they are, across email, mobile apps and social networks, not to mention across the counter,” wrote Borrelli. “This isn't a ‘nice to have,’ it's the new normal, and customers are demanding it. That is why 56 percent of the leaders surveyed are providing or plan to provide service, support, or both via a mobile app for customer use within the next two years.”
One would think that with the pervasiveness of social media and mobile apps, more companies would be there already. A company that tries to build a digital infrastructure to accommodate residents (customers) who are already there is going to have a harder time than one that lays the foundation before a critical mass of customers arrive. Still, it’s not too late to create a comprehensive digital customer support plan and empower employees to use it in a cooperative way. Customers expect that their issues will be addressed now, by the person they’ve reached out to. Do anything less, and you risk driving them away.
“Bouncing up a chain of command to get a question answered or a problem resolved rarely ends with a happy customer,” wrote Borrelli. “Providing customer service agents with easy access to the information they need and the power to quickly resolve issues sets the stage for more efficient -- and satisfying -- customer interactions.”
The ultimate goal is to make a seismic shift in the company from reactive customer support – in which companies wait until customer fires become large before they struggle to put them out – to proactive customer support, in which customers’ needs are anticipated, previous interactions are available to anyone who touches that customer via any channel, and issues can be resolved in a single contact, also regardless of channel. Doing anything else risks frustrating customers (and customer-facing employees) and sabotaging the company’s opportunities for growth.
Edited by Maurice Nagle