Customers’ expectations for remarkable services have pushed many businesses towards digital transformation, and rightfully so. However, while many are still figuring out their digital transformation, some companies went for importing help desk data, and others have already achieved better customer satisfaction and reviews.
Digital transformation has upgraded the UI for many businesses, yet some don’t understand how to incorporate digital transformation to articulate customer support.
To get to the position where you can provide good customer service, you have to start with the basics. So let’s start with what digital transformation is.
Digital Transformation or Digital Makeover?
In the online world, which is constantly changing, you always have to be on your feet and up to date with new technologies and tools. So not only do you have to be aware of the digital world, but you also have to embrace these technologies into your system.
A straightforward definition would be digital transformation is embracing and incorporating new technologies into your business architecture to upgrade your game from time to time.
Digital transformation is enhanced customer services. Now, customers can interact with service providers whenever they need, and provide feedback to improve your business. The customers use your services, so they know what can be upgraded for better results.
Customers today are smarter and they want the best experience. They know all about Technologies and prefer business models that are up to date. They want a better mobile UI experience as they are on their mobiles more than 80% of the time.
How Digital Transformation Affects Businesses?
Businesses rely most on their customers, and customers crave the best services that businesses provide and great customer support. Digital transformation enhances business services in terms of flexibility, customer support, and interaction to eventually affect a business.
If a customer is satisfied with your services, they’ll most likely stay loyal to your brand in the long term. Loyal customers will generate more sales and recommend your services to other consumers. And customer satisfaction can be achieved with digital transformation. Still, businesses shy away from digital change for one reason or another. There are many benefits of digital transformation for a company for example:
- Businesses can achieve more flexibility in communication, analytics, and data storage by a simple digital transformation.
- Customer support can improve with advancements in technology, improving the brand-customer relationship in the long term.
- Digital transformation automates the workflow, saving time and money for businesses. Even importing help desk data for digital transformation is easy and can be automated for a big or small business.
- Adopting a data-driven technology will improve business models for any business.
How to Lead Digital Transformation for Customer Services?
For digitization of customer services, there require many changes such as:
- In terms of sales, you have to reach out to the public differently than just putting an ad. You have to make a social platform, create more personalized content, respond to queries and comments, improve brand visibility with technologies. You have to build a more “personalized” relationship with potential customers through digital transformation.
- In terms of marketing, you have to take the path of digital marketing. Creating a multi-platform presence, reaching out to influencers as sponsors, and being up-to-date with what your target audience wants and prefers can be achieved with the digital transformation of your Business.
- And lastly, for customer support, you have to be active and attentive all the time. How’s that possible? Well, everything is possible with digitization. From being attentive to social media DMs and comments to creating feedback forums and reviews will help customers trust your brand. Even having a chatbot that can provide essential help will be appreciated by customers.
Read Also: 7 Reasons Your Business Should Invest in Digital Transformation
What Can You Achieve with Digital Transformation?
Two things that always get mixed up are Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Success (CS). Although they are both related to loyal customers, they are still different.
Customer Experience refers to your service providing an excellent experience for customers. For example, an e-commerce App has a great UI, making it easy for consumers to interact and explore different options quickly. That’s a good experience for a consumer.
Customer Success comes after customer experience. Now you have figured out how they’ll buy something from your app. You have to optimize according to your customers’ needs and generate sales while keeping a loyal customer. You have to help them with their replacement, refund, or return. You also have to help them track their orders.
They both go hand in hand and neither should be overlooked. Digital transformation plays a significant role in both parts of a business. However, Digital transformation also got these two mixed up. So, you have to be very strategic with your digital transformation to achieve positive customer service.
But before introducing you to strategies to lead a digital transformation, we will greet you with some essential factors which can get messed up during digital transformation.
- omnichannel customer interactions
- IoT and connected devices
- nurturing customer communities
Omnichannel Customer Interaction
Today a consumer could be anywhere in the world, and therefore they could be using any form of technology. To attain these customers, you have to use different channels for better communication. On a social media page, a website, a blog post, a reading forum, or a discord server, you have to consider every means of communication that will improve your customers’ interaction.
On top of that, you have to be very active. Customers today don’t wait as they have many options, but you don’t. That’s why you have to keep a check on time, Always!
IoT and Connected Devices
Internet of things or IoT is a network of all digital devices. These devices communicate through data. By 2025, there will be about 55.7 B IoT devices. This makes it a big part of the business sector as well. IoT devices play a leading role in digital transformation. How?
- IoT devices’ data tells a lot about customer behavior in the online world. This data can be used to understand customer needs and, therefore, help in digital transformation. Once you know the customer, you can serve them better, leading to more sales.
- IoT devices not only collect data but also automate workflow by different means. Automation of workflow will increase productivity and profit.
- Another benefit of automation is flexibility. IoT devices provide easy data migrations; therefore, it becomes easy to implement new tools and technologies in your system.
Nurturing Customer Communities
Even in the traditional or old-fashioned era of businesses, the customer stays if they have a better buyer-seller relationship and experiences with a company or provider of service. Therefore a business’s goal should be to build better relationships with its customers. Be more personalized and considerate towards customers. Studies show that customers will pay more for a good experience; it is just like ‘tipping.’
And to build better relationships with the customers, you have to know them and understand their needs. The best way to do so is to interpret the data and study their behavior. A digital transformation allows you to do so. There Are countless tools and analytics that study the behavior of people online. This data will help you to adapt technology according to your customers.
Simply incorporating an analytical tool in your website will tell you about what customers are interacting most with, what gets fewer clicks, even what gets their attention most.
Social media will help you to learn about consumers. Just looking through a comment section can tell you a lot about people. You can see what’s selling and what’s not. It’s easier to be relatable by a social media page and creating an interacting yet marketing meme for customers.
That’s how you learn about them, be relatable to them with your creativity and slowly build a nurturing relationship with your customers.
How to Build a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy?
Digital transformation is more than just adopting new technologies, and it’s also about building new strategies and reshaping the business operation to achieve a goal. About $1.3 trillion was spent on digital transformation in 2018; still, many businesses didn’t benefit from digitization. This is not because it wasn’t worth it but because it wasn’t well planned through.
This is how a digital transformation journey should go.
1) Start with Strategies first then Investment
Before investing in a digital makeover plan, you should make strategies to work out just as fine.
- First off, start evaluating your current business strategies plans and then narrow down growth opportunities and goals.
- Look for your competitors – what digital tool or media they are active on, how’s their business doing after a digital makeover. Questions like these will help you learn from others’ mistakes and right doings, so you don’t waste your time.
- Many digital services provide a free trial. Try out these services for some time to see what works. And plan out your budget for digital transformation.
- Once you figure out all the digital tools, media, marketing strategies, plans, and services, initiate the most effective digital transformations into your business one step at a time.
2) Up-to-date upgraded Customer Journey
Businesses are and should be customer-centric. That’s why upgrading customer journey with personalization is crucial for a strategic digital transformation. A personalized journey will benefit both companies and customers. Understand their needs and desires to cover them in your services.
Collect the data associated with the customers’ online behavior, track their online footprints, and pursue a digital transformation to meet customers’ needs and satisfaction.
3) Give Personalized Services
We have mentioned throughout this piece that customers seek customized experiences that meet their ends. That’s why you’ll need to cater to their needs with personalized services. Embrace tools and technologies that provide you with your target customers’ data and help you build and improve customer services from the data.
For example, a personalized chatbot can talk with a consumer one-on-one. Consumers might have queries or feedback for your services with recommendations that will further help you to improve your services directly. A chatbot can also guide consumers through your website or app, allowing your consumers to be more interactive.
4) Create a New IT Ecosystem
Choosing the right technologies that’ll work for your business is an important part of a digital transformation. Unfortunately, according to the survey, 45% of companies deficit the necessary technologies for implementing a successful digital transformation of customer services. And that’s why they cannot still generate sales in the online world.
So, what are those necessary technologies that you need?
Must-Have Tools and Softwares for Digital Transformation of Customer Services
Cloud technology will be a great addition to your digital transformation journey. Cloud technologies make businesses more flexible and customer-friendly.
Another valuable tool will be a help desk system. A help desk system helps you record and store customers’ interactions with your business. It also allows you to narrow down essential customer information for better interpretation. A help desk solution also automates the system’s whole workflow, which makes it easier and more productive for your team.
Always choose a help desk solution that works best for your business. And rely on automating a help desk migration service to migrate your data from one system to another. Choosing the right migrating service is also important since you will make changes in your system and introduce new tools in the system that suit you best.
Software protection is also necessary to protect data. For example, you’ll need endpoint protection software, web gateway, and data encryption to prevent the system from getting infected by different malware and data leaks.
Key Takeaways
Digital transformation is a long road to cover, but a few things that should always be prioritized are:
- Personalization: A consumer prefers a customized service that caters to their needs and satisfaction. And if they like your service, they stick around for a long time. Therefore, use a help desk solution to get to know your customers, collect their data and offer them a personalized experience like none other.
- Cloud Technologies: cloud tools are more agile and flexible than on-site tech solutions. So, opt for a cloud tool if you haven’t already. Cloud tools also provide higher data security and reliability than other tools. That’s why many businesses have personalized cloud tools like iCloud. In addition, cloud tools are always up-to-date with the technology; therefore, you won’t need to upgrade it every time, and it is highly incorporated with other business tools.
- Omnichannel Approach: Your Consumers use different communication channels depending upon their preference. If you want to please your customers and be a great service provider go for an omnichannel approach. Use as many communication channels as possible and work on them together to provide excellent customer services all around the clock.
Remark these key points and work on them as you move towards digitizing your customer services or overall business for best results. Follow one instruction at a time while keeping others in mind and eventually adopting all of them.
