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Digital Branding

THE RESEARCH

The rapid rise of “digital native” companies, such as Spotify or Uber, exposes customers to simple, streamlined user experiences designed from the ground up for digital delivery. With the advent of digital customer experience and the emergence of entirely digital players Digital Customer Care becomes an increasingly important element across the entire customer lifecycle.

Sprint Reply has conducted a study to research the field of Digital Customer Care (DCC) by performing in-depth interviews with digital customer service executives of large German corporations as well as Digital Experience technology suppliers. Furthermore, a technical benchmarking analysis of both B2C web and mobile services has been conducted.


RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

THE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CUSTOMER CARE

  • Faster
    service

    Companies using DCC systems have recognized that complaints and requests have been handled five times faster.

  • Higher customer satisfaction

    Purely digital journeys drive higher customer satisfaction – users starting and ending a customer service interaction digitally show on an average 20% higher satisfaction rates.

  • Lower
    cost

    Costs of digital approaches estimated to be significantly lower (i.e. -56% for chats; -12% for forum and FAQ; -9% for community solutions)

  • Higher
    differentiation

    A well designed digital support channels UIX allowing users to navigate faster and more intuitively with a high level of interactivity.

WHAT DO COMPANIES EXPECT?

Customer Care is undergoing an evolution: In the past it has been regarded as an inevitable cost factor. But it is becoming more and more a strategic investment with measured ROI & NPS. Nowadays, DCC is consistently among the Top 5 strategic priorities of companies. Therefore, most participants already provide some kind of Digital Customer Care across the entire customer journey.

  • 60%

    of participants emphasize on Cost Reduction

  • 30%

    think that DCC leads to Cost Reduction and better Service

  • 10%

    see just a chance for Better Service

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How many channels are used for
customer service requests?

  • >6 channels
  • 3-5 channels
  • none
  • 1-2 channels

THE OMNICHANNEL APPROACH


Omnichannel is a must-have for most participants, since their consumers use up to six channels for customer care requests. Seamless multichannel transactions, however, remain a challenge given the lack of backend system integration.

Traditional channels, including letters and fax are still of relevance for German consumers; together with call centers they still represent the vast majority of customer care interactions.


NEW CHANNELS ARE ON THE RISE

  • Text Chat: 57% of the participating companies offer text chat on their website
  • Video Chat: 29% have video chat in their portfolio
  • AI Chatbots: 0%, despite the need for AI-enabled chatbots, they cannot be found on web yet

CHANNELS USED BY DAX 30


Most of the German DAX 30 companies are present on social media, especially on Facebook and Twitter, but Instagram also plays a major role. But these companies are not only present on these channels, but also interact with their customers via social media. Best practices are Allianz and Vonovia, with presence and interaction on all four social media channels analyzed for this study.

3 MAJOR CUSTOMER CARE TRENDS

The research showed that Omnichannel is a must, since customers are using a broad spectrum of channels with chats becoming increasingly relevant. However, WhatsApp is not one of them yet. Social Media gains more dominance. With more channels available the focus has to lie on data management in the different customer care channels. Within this playground the main trends are:

MESSAGING

MESSAGING

MESSAGING: 2019 will be the year of messaging for large companies

One trend that can be clearly witnessed is that consumers are progressively shifting away from traditional channels like calls and emails. The winner of this migration is messaging and it is set to grow, with the most popular messaging apps, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, each being used by more than 1bn users worldwide.

CHATBOTS AND AI

CHATBOTS AND AI

CHATBOTS AND AI: Machines get better at answering your questions

Increasingly consumers use company websites as their landing page for customer care requests. As recent surveys reveal consumers actually appreciate bots to experience instant support for their requests. 64% rate the 24/7-service a bot can offer as number one advantage, 55% say the instant response is among their priorities and 55% see advantages in bots when it comes to clarifying simple questions.

MOBILE

MOBILE

MOBILE: Be at your customers hands

All survey participants recognized the massive trend towards mobile. However there is ambivalence on consolidation of Apps: While some will consolidate their plethora of Apps (up to 50), some claim that they will not – and actually cannot – due to differentiated functionality and issues with merging backend systems. The same applies to the consolidation of web and mobile apps: Two thirds of participants revealed that functionality of Web-app and App need to be harmonized, allowing for similar care experiences on both channels.

LEARN MORE

You want to get to know all the results we retreived during our research and learn more about what they mean for your business?

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