5 Simple Strategies to Digitizing Customer Service

Technology is enabling organisations to do more with Customer Service globally and specifically in Africa.

I address 5 ways in which a business can digitize customer service to lower operational cost and make clients happy.

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•  Provide self-service options for your clients:  Firstly Allow your customers to self-serve.Most people mistake digitzation for creating an online platform however in  the African context, best options can include  platforms such as WhatsApp or sms to help clients resolve issues on their own, at home  and at any time .  DSTV( a cabel chanel) allows clients to  unblock error codes on thier decoders by allowing their customer to text a number with their serial code to an short form number

The trick here is to find out repetitive service requests and complaints made by clients  and provide options of self service . Note, it is also important also to give feedback to clients when they kick off a self service options , you risk annoying clients when they is no proper feedback loop .

• Create an FAQ Channel:  Invesitgate and put together  list of frequently asked questions by clients and provide easy ,appropriate and simple  answers. This enables clients  to get answers to mundane questions  with a simple search thereby, giving your customer service team more time to undertake complex tasks and requests. Start small, put together the top 10 most asked questions with their responses and make them available on your platforms. Again  Sms, WhatsApp or an online platform can be used to achieve this .
• Create a customer community: Create a community of users and  clients. This enables  peer- learning or  on your products or services, again you can use  something as basic as a Facebook or LinkedIn group.The trick here is to get a  community manager,who can share good content and moderate the platform. Creating a community around your product or service is also a great way to collect customer feedback . e.g. Drip.com has a Facebook platform where users ask questions on anything they need to know about Drip and get assistance from fellow users

• Allow customer self- personalization : Depending on kind of product or service, create a platform that allow clients to customize/personalize product or service to their taste before they pay for it. This gives your clients a good feel of the product, a feeling it was made just for them.e.g spreashshirt.com allows client to customers to personaize thier t-shirts online before they pay for it
• Customer Relationship management System: [Defining CRM. C-R-M stands for Customer Relationship Management. … At its simplest definition, a CRM system allows businesses to manage business relationships and the data and information associated with them] The CRM System enables  track customer behavior with an app or webpage. This can tell you what clients are checking out, clicking, actions being taken after the first click. As a company, this helps you to simply know what is working and what simply is not and how best to manage these for utmost customer satisfaction.

in 5 simple options you can digitize your customer service,make your customers happy,free up your employees for more complex tasks and lower your operational cost.

Benefits of embracing digital channels for customer self-service:.

• Cost savings through increased automation and self-service
• Increased revenues, e.g. by making bill pay more convenient to use
• CX improvements through 24/7/365 customer service on channels everyone loves
• Fast answers to simple questions – in seconds vs hours or days