6 trends in digital customer interactions
1. Increase customer loyalty with digital transformations
The pandemic has completely changed the way consumers store, work and live, and consumers are more digital than ever. Digital transformation has logically come at a rapid pace. According to research company Gartner, by 2023 more than 60% of all customer service will be delivered via digital self-service channels, up from 23% in 2019. More and more organizations are therefore going to design their processes to be flexible, automated and agile in order to keep today’s customer engaged.
2. The customer of today is not the customer of the future
Your customer of today, is not the same customer with the same needs as in 5 years. Both consumers and employees have increasingly higher demands and expectations when it comes to the digitalization of your organization. The digital customer interaction you have with your customer should be fast, easy and personal. Therefore, force yourself to follow developments closely and see what fits within your organization and goals. What comes close to that?
3. Digital self-service is a reality
Our smartphones are increasingly used to replace physical stores. Organizations need to tailor their customer interactions accordingly. After all, you want to keep talking to your customer. What you still regularly encounter are forms that are sent by e-mail to a (new) customer. The customer receives them in his inbox and has to print the form, fill it out and then take a picture of it and mail it back as an image. This can and must be more customer-friendly. It would be more logical if you can do this through convenient tooling and channels. This is an advantage for your customer, but it also ensures that the right information enters your organization’s processing flow faster.
4. Every customer journey fully personalized
Implementing hyper-personalization allows you to truly recognize, understand and help your customer. Adding something there that helps your customer. You are constantly looking at how you can add value and engage in a personal customer interaction. To realize this, organizations are investing in technologies that allow them to use their customer data in a smarter and more targeted way. For marketing, this means messages that are tailored to the individual (appropriate in terms of relevance, channel and time); for service, it means taking more account of the context (time, nature of the problem) and preferences (such as channel). In sales, it can lead to personalized products – something that is still in its early stages.
5. Chatbots that really understand you
The chatbots of the future are full-fledged personal assistants that can deal with and understand emotions. The shift is from NLP (Natural Language Processing) bots to NLU (Natural Language Understanding) bots. In the near future, you won’t realize whether you are talking to a human or a chatbot. Current chat technology already makes it possible for bots to provide complete digital support when ordering specific products or services. A logical next step is to be able to help solve problems, where the chatbot tries to form an image of the context and reacts to the customer’s emotion for an even better customer interaction. But note: to be able to do this, an AI bot is quickly being considered. This requires a lot of data and a long learning curve. You can now gain experience with conversational chatbots.
6. From ‘I want to sell something’ to ‘I want to value something’
Looking closely at your data and using your big data to add value to your customers; an increasingly important trend that ensures a long-term relationship with your customers. A concrete example: based on various data models you can see that the subscription consumption of a customer is too low compared to what he pays every month. As an organization you can proactively offer a more appropriate subscription. This is not primarily about selling, but about continuously giving the right advice. Create added value for your customers so they stay with you. Ask yourself, do you want to be an advisor or do you want to be a salesperson?
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Kaspar is the CEO and founder of Aspire, a consulting firm specializing in Customer Communications Management and Customer Experience Management. Dialog Group and Kaspar have the same mission: to help companies with their digital transformation to improve the customer experience company-wide.