Digital customer service simply means meeting the needs of your customers through digital channels such as email, text messaging, chat, and social media messaging. Although it’s differentiated from traditional phone-based customer service, today, technologies like Helpshift exist to enable the integration of digital customer service with voice calls.
What is a Digital Customer Service?
Digital customer service is the use of online platforms and technologies to provide support and assistance to customers. This includes channels such as live chat, email, social media, and self-service portals, enabling prompt and efficient resolution of inquiries. It leverages digital tools to enhance responsiveness, streamline service processes, and improve overall customer experience.
Why Does Digital Customer Service Matter?
Whenever possible, customers prefer to handle issues with messaging, especially if they can conduct the conversation within the app they’re already using. Millennials (the most prominent generation in the workplace as of 2015) tend to text versus picking up the phone. According to a recent Gallup poll, texting is the dominant way of communicating for Americans under 50. Of all the ways they communicate, “send or read a text message” occurs the most often — 39% of them do it “a lot” every day. They’re also the generation that has helped popularize Slack, the professional messaging app that surpassed 10 million users earlier this year.
Because today’s consumers are native messengers, digital customer service has become table stakes for all types of companies. It’s the rare, quaint company that only offers phone service at this point.
But not all companies do digital customer service well. As the options for digital customer service platforms have expanded, so has the range of quality of digital customer service. At the less sophisticated end of the spectrum lie companies that simply rely on siloed and disjointed channels like the phone, email, and live chat to give customers options — but haven’t found ways to integrate these platforms together. At the other end of the spectrum are companies that take advantage of digital customer service technology to offer integrated, intuitive, sometimes automated, and satisfying customer service experiences across channels.
Best Practices for a Digital Customer Service Strategy
- Prioritize Customer Feedback for Continuous Improvement
- Ensure Accessibility and Inclusivity
- Utilize Analytics for Proactive Support
- Train Agents on Digital Etiquette and Tools
- Maintain Data Security and Privacy Standards
- Offer Personalization Across Digital Touchpoints
- Monitor and Optimize Response Times
How Helpshift Supports Digital Customer Service
Helpshift’s digital customer service platform provides a convenient and conversational channel on which customers can communicate with brands. With an emphasis on messaging-based customer service, it uses the same interface consumers are used to with apps like iMessage and Whatsapp. Asynchronous messaging capability enables ongoing messaging threads that allow conversations to stop and pick up again at the customer’s convenience.
Leveraging automation, Helpshift customers can use bots to take care of routine tasks and issues within the messaging framework and even handle some customer service issues from end to end.
