The digital service came to stay. The question now is no longer “if” your company will adopt this type of service, but “when” will this News.
And to know if the “when” for your company is close or has arrived, it is necessary to analyze some questions related to the quality of the service provided by your team.
Among these issues, the number of calls made, the response time or solution to the customer’s request, the number of calls received outside office hours, the flows for transferring calls to the responsible sectors and, also, an in-depth analysis of the data obtained in the previous points.
We have already published a text in which we detail each of these issues and explain how to measure the quality of your company’s service.
Considering that you have already evaluated the quality of service provided to your customers, in this post we are going to talk about the trends in digital service and how they apply to different market segments.
Digital service – what is it and how does it work
First, we need to make a brief historical review to understand what is the digital service and how we got there.
A few years ago, customer service was basically carried out by telephone, as this was the main means of communication between companies and their audiences.
Then the phone started sharing space with email. Many companies began to provide electronic addresses for their customers to get in touch with the customer service (SAC).
Some time later, the popularization of the internet – and especially of smartphones – transformed the way in which consumers began to contact the companies with which they interact.
Before that, however, organizations had already registered an increase in the demand for non-face-to-face services. With cell phones in hand, many people stopped going to the company in search of information or solutions to their problems, leading to the expansion of service teams, with the implementation of call centers, to answer phone calls and respond to emails.
Going back to the popularization of the internet, smartphones and, now, including instant messaging applications and social networks, one can imagine the impact on the volume of service provided by companies.
Add to that greater access to information, which also led more people, previously silent in their homes, to look for the companies’ SAC to suggest, complain and make other types of requests.
Well then… This historical context is necessary for us to understand the turnaround in customer service in recent years.
The self-service menus
For appointments, dial 1. For complaints, dial 2. To speak with one of our attendants, dial 3. And we usually kept waiting for the last option, because we believed that only one person would be able to understand and meet our demands.
Who never?
Today, the services are very different. Yes, the menus continue and many of them no longer bring the long-awaited ‘last option’, because a good part of consumer demands can be resolved automatically, that is, with digital service.
Multilayer Digital Service
And here we are… Explaining both the origin and trends of this type of service that is becoming more and more common. And it’s not just on the phone that the menus are present.
WhatsApp, for example, gained a Business version, to offer digital service to customers of companies from numerous segments.
For questions with YES or NO answers, there is no need for humanized care. A robot (virtual agent or chatbot or, simply, bot) does the trick.
And for slightly more complex questions, the robots are also very useful: they filter the demands and forward them to the most qualified person or sector to offer an assertive answer to the customer, diverting contact from the call center and resolving the situation in a single call.
Thus, fewer calls reach the attendants and those that do arrive are resolved quickly.
Briefly, we explain the digital service multilayer, which includes automated service (chatbot, for yes or no questions), intelligent service (which filters demand and directs it to the responsible sector) and humanized service (that is, a flesh-and-blood customer service like us).
Depending on your business segment, the type of product or service you offer, even with the increase in the volume of calls, the same team will handle the work if other ‘layers’ of service are associated with the humanized service, allowing them to reach the attendants only the calls that the previous levels were not able to resolve.
Hybrid service
O digital service of the hybrid type, combines automated/intelligent and humanized service. What changes in relation to the multilayer service is that, in this case, the service is initiated by the chatbot and completed by the attendant, that is, regardless of the request, the user will go through both types of service.
And how does this improve the service flow, if all calls go through the attendant?
By assertiveness.
Imagine yourself calling a hospital. How many different departments are there? And within each department, how many sectors?
The automated service will filter the call: hospitalization, imaging services, ombudsman, HR. A second filter will bring options according to the selected department. Let’s say it’s the imaging service: radiography, ultrasound, MRI.
There, you select an option and are transferred directly to the attendant in the desired sector – from robot to humanized service.
Conversation commerce
Such digital service can be considered the evolution of e-commerce, however, here, negotiations are made between people, through social networks, and no longer between the customer and the shopping site.
The customer contacts the company via Instagram, for example, requesting information about a product, payment methods and terms or stock availability. The attendant receives, responds and initiates negotiation with the customer.
If the interaction is interrupted and resumed the next day, even if it is not the same attendant, the previous conversation is recorded and negotiation continues from the point where it left off.
It is worth remembering that there are tools that allow the centralization of several communication channels, facilitating the management of contacts and ensuring agility in the assistance.
Digital home office service
That’s right. With the solution mentioned above, you can hire professionals to handle your company’s services from their home office.
The tool is online and the attendant can access all communication channels with his client.
Receives calls, forwards demands or solves them himself, speeding up service and improving customer satisfaction.
The advantage is that you don’t need to have physical space to expand your service team. Just have the right solution and hire people to do the job.
Omnichannel platform for digital service
If you’ve made it this far, you must be curious to learn more about the tool mentioned above, which centralizes different service channels and facilitates contact management, in addition to ensuring agility and improving customer satisfaction.
That solution is ¡Hola! Suite, an omnichannel platform developed to solve your company’s customer service needs and which, in addition to speeding up responses, enables the registration of all contacts, categorization by priority level, the status of the call (open, in service, closed) , as well as the history of who was involved in each step of the service.
To learn more about digital service contact with us. In addition to answering your questions, we’ll show you how ¡Hola! Suite can improve your company’s service.
