Sabio highlights Top Ten tactics for accelerating customer take-up of digital contact channel

Customer experience specialist outlines deployment-ready tactics for increased digital engagement

Customer experience solutions expert Sabio has identified 10 tactics that CX teams can immediately apply to help increase customer take-up of their digital engagement channels. Based on insights gathered from helping organisations to close the gap between their digital and traditional contact customer contact channels, Sabio’s recommendations are specifically designed to help accelerate digital channel performance and contribute towards delivering business outcomes.

“Recent research from Capgemini suggests that – for many organisations – delivering on digital transformation initiatives is proving more complex than originally thought, with much of the blame being laid at poor quality digital design of services and the ability of employees to collaborate effectively with digital services,” commented Matt Dyer, Principal Solutions Manager for Sabio. “Successful customer journey design and the ability to deliver service equivalence across both digital and traditional customer contact channels are clearly critical here, so at Sabio we’re highlighting ten approaches that organisations can apply to accelerate their digital engagement initiatives.”

“However, before investing in new digital engagement channels, it’s critical that organisations think hard about exactly what it is they’re trying to achieve. For example, while some organisations might be looking to deflect demand into their contact centres and reduce overall service costs, others will be focused on developing digitally-enabled journeys that reduce customer frustration and contribute to improved CSAT and NPS scores,” he added. “Once you’re clear on your focus, then it’s much easier to determine the specific tactics that will help organisations to accelerate digital channel take-up. As ever, your choices will depend entirely on the business outcomes you’re looking to achieve.”

Sabio’s Top Ten Tactics for increasing Digital Engagement take-up:

1. Understand your Digital drivers – digital initiatives need to be part of a broader customer engagement strategy that’s designed from the ground up to support your underlying business goals and target outcomes. When you’re clear on the drivers, it’s much easier to reverse engineer both digital and voice-enabled customer journeys to deliver excellent customer experiences regardless of the channels involved.
2. Embed Self-Service as part of your customer on-boarding process – for example, in any email communication you should be embedding links to messaging or webchat, enabling direct links to your Contact Us number via WebRTC, and evolving your IVR to pick up where a call has originated from via meta tags – allowing your agents to engage customers contacting via digital channels more effectively.
3. Establish equivalence between Digital and Traditional channels – encourage digital take-up by trying to make sure that customers are able to do everything they can on a voice call on your digital channels. Too often customers are forced to exit webchat for a follow-up voice interaction, or are frustrated by Virtual Assistants that can’t resolve their queries.
4. Digitally enable your Voice Channel – if customers are calling in from a mobile then it’s a great opportunity to offer features such as co-browse that agents can use to introduce callers to the kind of services that are available digitally – effectively coaching them to become self-service customers.
5. Make your customers work a little harder – many organisations say they’re following a digital-first engagement strategy while still driving voice traffic into the contact centre by promoting their phone number on their website. Research suggests that customers will pursue self-service if no obvious voice option is available, so perhaps it’s time to make customers work a little harder? It’s also now possible to surface phone numbers on websites when customer behaviour suggests that a voice contact would be the best option.
6. Independently map your customer journeys – there’s often a big difference between an organisation’s stated digital strategy and how customers actually behave across their different channels. Get your customer journeys independently assessed and benchmarked against actual customer behaviours before designing your brand archetypes.
7. Resource your digital channels correctly – Workforce Management (WFM) tools are widely deployed to optimise contact centre employee forecasting and scheduling, but it’s surprising how many organisations have still to apply the same discipline to their digital channels. Take advantage of the digital capabilities offered by the latest enterprise-wide WFM solutions – before your webchat or messaging customers get fed up with waiting.
8. Effective digital engagement requires much smarter analytics – Too few organisations make full use of experience analytics when shaping their digital customer journeys. As consumers we provide organisations with more data than ever before – more than enough for CX teams to design the digital channels, functionality and integration needed for customers, and for organisations to achieve the right business outcomes.
9. Get customers involved early – offer customers the opportunity to be part of mobile app trials or new digital services. Not only will this help build their confidence in digital, but will also prove invaluable in terms of lasting engagement and improved NetPromoter scores.
10. Take your Virtual Assistants to the next level – too often Virtual Assistants fail because of limited automation and poor content. Virtual Assistants need to be closely aligned with your digital mission – whether that’s delivering on transactions or being much more conversational. If a Virtual Assistant doesn’t successfully deflect demand then it’s not doing its job.

Sabio’s broad expertise in customer experience solutions – from customer journey mapping and user experience design through to technical deployment, ongoing support and engagement analytics – makes the company a unique partner for organisations looking to develop and optimise their digital engagement strategies.

Sabio works with customers to recommend where digital and traditional channels will bring most value to their customer contact strategy, whether that be an integration to deflect and triage live chat, assist website interaction, grow channel reach or better manage transitions to human assisted service in the contact centre. Once the precise requirement is identified, Sabio can create best practice solutions from initial proof of concepts through to full production deployment and managed services delivery.