The digital age pushes companies to jump out of their comfort zones and modify their business models to cater to the changes in the new marketing reality. Interestingly, the trend driving all these changes and dictating business decisions are the customers' evolving demands and purchasing behaviours.
Nowadays, customers are becoming more particular with content. They want information that's relevant to their preferences and can easily be viewed on the device they're using. Businesses must consider this need and make the customer journey as smooth as possible if they want to satisfy their customers.
To keep up with your consumers, it's important to leverage the power of technology to raise customer satisfaction. Technology is key to connecting with your target market wherever they are and bringing your products and/or services within their reach.
Hence, the need for digital transformation.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the process of incorporating digital technology into all aspects of a business. The goal is to boost the efficiency of your processes and most importantly, to give more value to your customers.
Digital transformation calls on business owners and marketers to change how they interact with their customers. It's also about taking advantage of all applicable advancements to elevate the customer experience in all touchpoints of the business.
Companies that pivot to digital-driven customer service are able to engage their customers better. In effect, this move produces the following benefits:
- Customers are more likely to buy more often from your brand.
- Unparalleled customer service naturally leads customers to refer your brand to their family and peers.
- It helps build brand loyalty and increases customer satisfaction. A pleasant, memorable encounter with your brand encourages customers to choose you even when other companies may have better products or lower prices.
Since your consumers are the driving force behind your business, it's crucial to understand how they think and behave. This information should be central in developing your digital marketing strategy to enhance customer experience.
Considering all these, how should the shift to digital customer service trends influence your marketing decisions?
Factors to Consider When Reimagining Your Marketing Strategies
Keep in mind the following factors as you come up with new strategies to interact with customers over digital platforms:
- Focus on social selling
Most of the world is on social media. It's likely your customers are there as well. Use social media to sell and promote your products. Rather than waiting for your customers to call you, make the first move to get in touch with them.
Social media is a great platform to bring your offer to your target market while educating them about it. Share interesting and relevant content. Be a voice of authority in your industry.
- Set a budget for digital advertising
Going digital means setting aside budget and resources for your advertising efforts aside from printing, TV ads, and billboards but also on email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media advertising, and search engine optimization (SEO). Remember that you need to use digital channels to reach out to tech-savvy customers. Analyze data from these channels to create highly personalized messages for your target customers.
- Be where your customers are
Gone are the days when the only means of receiving and addressing customer concerns are via phone or fax. The digital age requires customer service teams to be more proactive. Explore other platforms.
Exhaust all possible digital channels to talk to and help your customers. For starters, you have social media, forums, review sites, and blog communities.
If you want to do more for your customers, you have to be familiar with the best practices in digitized customer service. There are simple ways to get started. Read on to find out how you can rethink your strategy.
How to Supercharge Your Customer Service in a Digital World
- Set clear and measurable goals
A strategy has no direction without a definite goal. If you want to pivot your current strategy, it's important to be clear about what you want to achieve. Your goals should be consistent with your business objectives and your customers' needs.
An example of a clear and measurable goal is to get 600 leads from Facebook in the next 4 months. Following this example, setting a specific goal helps you create valuable content targeted to your demographic.
- Crawl under your customers' skin
Developing a plan becomes easier when you have a firm understanding of your customers. This means having a grasp of their needs, desires, pain points, and behaviour.
It's also essential to get an insight into their goals, challenges, and how your product or service can address their concerns. Once you have all this information, create your customer persona. Then modify your customer journey based on these details.
- Put yourself out there
If you want people to discover your offer, you first need to be visible. Ask yourself these questions: Where will your audience see you? How can they see your content? How can they access your services? How are they going to contact you? The more you're clear about your answers, the easier it becomes to determine the tools to increase your visibility.
Any technology-literate customer turns to Google to get instant information. Almost everyone uses the search engine to get more information about a product or service before making a purchase. This is why you need SEO and Google Adwords so your business will appear on the search engine results page. You can also be more active on social media and share more content about your company.
- Create a delightful digital customer experience
Customer experiences are powerful. Make them satisfying, and you'll create repeat business; make them unpleasant and you'll turn away customers (for good). Make it a goal to continuously improve every interaction your customers have with your brand.
This may be enhancing your software UX, putting skilled and emphatic customer service support staff at the forefront, or sharing helpful articles to your clients. To learn how you can improve your service, gather feedback from your customers. Ask them about their recent experience with your company.
- Track and analyze
Use the data at your disposal to improve your processes and services. Evaluate your customer journey and each touchpoint, then find out if there are any issues. Rectify these issues and remove friction points that are stopping prospective buyers from becoming a customer. Feel free to experiment.
- Get a secure IT system
When wading through the digital waters, you need the right technology that supports your digital strategies. Success-oriented teams know that their strategies are only as successful as their tools, systems, and equipment.
Invest in Cloud technology as you go full-on digital. The Cloud system empowers businesses to be more dynamic and responsive to customer demands. Using Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like mobile apps lets you capture and store crucial data about your customers. This data can inform your future strategies so you can deliver better customer experience.
You can even use advanced technology to improve communications within your organization. A unified communication system enables team members to efficiently collaborate with each other in serving customers.
Every business that wants to serve their customers better and keep up with their competitors eventually needs to go digital. The world and its people continue to move up in terms of technology. Businesses must head in the same direction to stay relevant.
If you need an IT support company who can assist you in transitioning to digital customer service, BrantTel Networks is here for you. Our Cloud Contact Centres in Mississauga, Burlington, Kitchener, London, and Hamilton support Avaya products, unified communications, the AWS Activate program, and other products and services. We can help you develop a strategy that will match your customers' demands and expectations.
Tell us how we can help your business succeed. Get in touch by sending us a message at info@branttel.com or call our toll-free hotline 1-(888)-632-0585.