You’re a consumer. I am, too.
So, let’s say we feel the need to engage with our favorite company.
Raise your hand if you want to be forced to use the phone.
How about forced into email?
What about web chat?
Of course you don’t.
Why?
Enter Today’s Digital Consumer
Today’s mobile consumers want to engage using digital messaging technologies. That means digital in-app engagements and advanced messaging. It also means having the option to use whatever device—whether smartphone or laptop or tablet—is on-hand at the very moment information or assistance is needed.
With their on-the-go, busy and often fragmented lifestyles, consumers demand speed, efficiency, control, and convenience from their customer experiences.
Digital customer engagement solutions require a shift in communication style to accommodate the interruptions and multi-tasking that are the hallmarks of the digital population.
Six Customer Requirements
At Contact Solutions, we spend a good deal of time doing primary research on digital customer engagement and digital context. In our research, we have found that virtually all customers:
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Seek control over the interaction, rather than being told how and when to engage.
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Expect to be recognized based on previous interactions and other history instead of being asked to supply basic data repeatedly.
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Want the flexibility to stop an interaction and resume when it’s convenient, picking up where they left off, even on a different device.
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Value proactivity, such as receiving a pop-up message from the representative, or an automatic message from their brands of choice.
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Want to know—and will recognize if—their needs are being met, even offline.
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Look for seamless transfers throughout the customer engagement system.
Ultimately meeting all of these expectations builds brand confidence, appreciation, and trust that your organization will always work behind the scenes to solve customer issues.
Four Agent Requirements
Additionally, these expectations dovetail with the goals of company representatives for higher efficiency, greater productivity, and improved customer satisfaction. Like their customers, representatives benefit from digital customer engagement:
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By optimizing self-service, smart digital assistants encourage customers to solve their own issues and reserve assisted interactions for complicated issues.
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By supplying context for every interaction, digital technologies help representatives drill down to the issue quickly and provide faster resolution.
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By accommodating individual customer preferences for timing, as well as ensuring a consistent support representative is available, the journey is shared, making it more personal for both.
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By allowing representatives to multi-task through multiple customer journeys—a hallmark of digital messaging—a greater sense of accomplishment is achieved. (Unlike phone and chat channels, digital messaging engagements are not serial.)
