Paolo Fabrizio
July 2, 2019

The Cultural Shift Towards Digital Customer Service

Corporate Culture Shift

Customers have become digital, using social and messaging apps to chat with friends, family and businesses. When it comes to getting support, they’re ‘fast and curious’ because they expect brands to deliver real-time solutions. That’s a demanding challenge for many companies – especially those who haven’t valued the role played by customer service in the past. That’s why if people want to deliver excellent customer experiences, they need to face a cultural shift within their business.

A Mindset Shift

Gone are the days of customer service as the ‘after-sales’ department. Today you need to be able to leverage digital conversations to get customer’s trust, thus build loyalty. That means taking actions in two directions:

  1. Empowering your customer service team – so that they will promptly get the information they need from other departments in order to give a final response/solution to the customer.
  2. Spreading customer service culture in every area of your organization.

You customer service culture needs to be based on clear values, shared and applied by each department. Even by those not having a customer facing function. Please consider that you will be able to achieve this goal only by getting executive buy-in.

Good news: smart brands leverage digital conversations to STAND OUT from their competitors. One of the keys to success is rewarding every single digital customer interaction, by taking care of them. Here’s an example you can learn from:

“If somebody spends 15 minutes of their time posting on our channel, we want to engage with them and reward them for talking about their love for our brand or one of our products as opposed to brushing it off or not even responding.”

– Mike Disser, Social Media Customer Service Manager @ToyotaUSA.

To get further insights you can read the full case study here.

An Omni-Digital View on Customer Service

In order to give you further inspiration for your business, I’m going to share with you a great piece of content, a special guide about Digital Customer Service.

I had the opportunity to contribute to Ringcentral’s guide ‘8 Expert Tips To Go Omni-Digital’ along with great professionals such as Shep Hyken, Colin Shaw and Ian Golding – just to name just a few. In this whitepaper, the main topics covered are:

• Undergoing Digital Transformation

• A Global View of Digital Channels

• Availability on Multiple Channels

• Importance of Fast and Resolutive Responses

• The Unifying Digital Channels

As I’m sure you’ll enjoy it and find interesting insights, here is the link where you can download the guide for FREE. Let me know your feedback in the comments!

Guide

Over To You

A widespread customer service culture is crucial to delivering excellent customer experiences. So, start working on your Digital Customer Service road map day by day. Once you get the first results, share them both internally and externally (other departments).

This is your cultural shift: market your customer service and have great conversations.

 

If you’d like some consulting or other help with your customer service, please contact us

Featured image: Copyright: ‘https://www.123rf.com/profile_rawpixel‘ / 123RF Stock Photo

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Paolo Fabrizio

Digital Customer Service Consultant, Trainer, Author, Speaker. Paolo has been helping companies to harness digital customer service as a business driver. Founder of CustomerServiceCulture, author of books and speaker at conferences in Italy and abroad. Lecturer at the Bicocca University of Milan