The last year has proven that customers will remain loyal to well-designed digital channels for the simplicity, convenience, and speed that they offer. A Nielsen report that surveyed the impact of COVID-19 on consumer behavior, stated that two out of five consumers in Singapore increased their online shopping activities. That is why it is now all the more essential to meet customer needs with empathy to alleviate the anxiousness they are still experiencing over uncertainties in the future. The question is, how can you blend both simplicity and empathy into your customer experience in 2021?
The COVID-19 outbreak last year severely impacted customer experience, with service leaders from all over the world pulling up their socks to revise their digital strategies and ensure unwavering customer satisfaction. As a result, the digital world underwent the remarkable transformation ever witnessed, but it does not end there. We can expect greater change to take place in 2021.
Make your customers your focal point
Most customers have now started feeling frustrated with businesses hiding behind COVID as an excuse for their unsatisfactory service, which indicates that the next chapter of digitization will focus on satisfying the rising expectations of customers. And what are customers expecting in 2021?
- Reliable Give your customers transparency and follow through on your service assurances on time.
- Easy Give your customers clarity and simplicity in all their interactions with you and your business so that they can do things quickly.
- Supportive Show your customers you care. Offer them an empathetic ear and help them solve their problems.
Now, how can this be translated into your customer experience strategy?
Cover all bases in your customer journey
Customers using digital platforms for the first time during the Covid-19 pandemic will continue to do and herald a 40% increase in the volume of digital interactions , says a report from Forrester.
As customers are now more likely to employ digital channels and self-service, in 2021, we can expect businesses to build on the foundations they set last year and work out the kinks to provide a much-improved omnichannel customer experience.
Organizations will need to review the entire customer journey from a comprehensive standpoint, ensuring that customers consistently experience outstanding service at every touchpoint.
This will require you to enable connectivity throughout your voice, chat, and social media platforms and grant your frontline teams access to all the customer contact touchpoints along with their interaction history from all channels. Your staff will often need to switch between channels and respond to customers quickly and accurately. Here, you can support your agents in their ability to provide excellent customer service by presenting all information in a manner that is easy to understand and access.
If you design your digital channels with the intention of a human-centric output, you can learn from the online behavior of your customers. You can then leverage this knowledge to provide empathy-driven digital service, for example, by giving them proactive support for wrinkle-free interactions.
Delivering exceptional customer experience requires harmony between automated and human engagement, ensuring a balanced human-digital ratio. For instance, when your customers need additional support outside of the automated engagement process, allow them the option to contact your agents through chat or call with ease.
Research published by MyCustomer: Empathy In Customer Service noted that 97% of consumers rate empathy or compassion in customer service interactions as very important/quite important.
Hence, businesses need to have the ability to accurately assess when a situation calls for assisted service, compared to when it needs the human touch – which usually is when the customer issue is complicated or driven by emotions.
In Summary
Without a doubt, digital channels will be on the rise in 2021. However, given the current atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety, what will make a difference to your customer experience strategy is the human element of your service delivery.
