The global Information Technology (IT) sector spending for 2022 is estimated at 5.3 trillion U.S. dollars.
The IT industry remains one of the most lucrative, producing revolutionizing solutions shaping the information age. Every day, a new company emerges in the IT sphere to disrupt the sector for good. But, how many of them leave a mark successfully?
However, companies can avoid the dismal fate of vanishing in the abyss of the global technology arena. All they require is a crucial differentiator that separates them from the lot. And what better stand-out feature than a remarkable customer service experience empowered by digital technologies?
Digital transformation is spearheading customer experience in the IT sector. Optimized operations, enhanced service management, and superior customer experience is helping companies stand out from the crowd. Let’s see how.
Table of Contents
What is digital transformation?
The digital transformation uses digital technologies to modify and adapt new business processes from operations, work culture, and customer experience. The goal of digital transformation is to adjust to the changing business landscape and leverage technology to boost customer satisfaction.
Companies understand that digital transformation is the need of the hour. The spending on digital transformation and services worldwide was a whopping 1.5 trillion dollars. Notably, the figure is predicted to touch a record benchmark of 2.8 trillion dollars by 2025! Optimizing digital transformation to supercharge customer experience in IT is crucial differentiator between successful and unsuccessful tech businesses.
Now, let’s see five ways digital transformation elevates the customer experience:
1 Creates omnichannel customer experiences
As per Gartner, customer experience influences two-thirds of customer loyalty, which is more than the combined influence of price and brand. A seamless customer experience across all touchpoints enables brands to offer the ease of conversation that a customer requires.
Drawbacks of multi-channel CX
Often, IT companies establish a multi-channel customer care setup. Companies mistakenly think that setting multiple independent touchpoints like advanced chatbots, dedicated customer executive teams, online chat support, and likewise mediums will lead to a higher customer experience. However, customers desire a seamless experience across all customer service channels where they do not have to reiterate their grievances.
Omnichannel CX
Digital transformation instead enables an omnichannel customer experience that combines all the touchpoints. Thanks to quick knowledge sharing and integrations of customer touchpoints, customers can continue the conversation where they left it when they switch from one medium to another. So, if customers move from online chat to a call with an executive, the executive will have access to customer conversation till then. It enables the support agent to address the customer issue instead of rediscussing the grievance quickly.
2 Provides instant solutions to customers
Customers expect quick resolutions from a company. Today, the attention span of an average human is a mere 8 seconds. Market analysts and leaders consider this as the average consumer span as well. It, therefore, necessitates companies to have a lightning-fast response to address customer needs.
Digital transformation fuses companies with cutting-edge technology solutions, software, and platforms. Take the example of a knowledge management platform. A knowledge management platform combines a company’s knowledge and organizes it into quickly accessible modules. The collected knowledge then helps companies streamline their self-service portals or empower their customer service agents to locate the information required quickly.
Organized and swiftly accessible knowledge elevates the status of customer experience in IT companies. Customers get immediate solutions, whether on an online portal or a call with a customer executive.
3 Personalized customer experiences
According to Forbes, experiences are a key decisive factor for customers to purchase. Here, digital transformation empowers companies to provide a personalized customer experience in the IT sector.
Integrating CRM software with a knowledge management platform aids agents in accessing all the information they need about a client in a single place. It empowers agents to directly jump into solving the customer grievance instead of requesting client information. Further, agents can look at the customer activities and make intelligent recommendations for new products and services.
Similarly, self-help channels are also made more humanized and offer customized insights. As per a Nuance Enterprise survey, 75% of respondents described self-service as a convenient way to address customer issues. AI-driven online portals like chatbots use the customer information in the knowledge based system to give a personalized experience to customers while addressing problems. Similarly, intelligent chatbots can upsell through customized suggestions.
4 Reduces the number of inbound call center traffic
IT companies have to maintain contact centers to provide a quick resolution to their customers. However, disorganized information systems lead to an increase in call timings and an unsatisfactory customer experience. Digital transformation aids IT companies in breaking through data silos, organizing knowledge, and providing quick redressal of customer issues. It further reduces the workload on contact centers support agents.
Articles and FAQs
A critical change that digital transformation brings to customer experience in IT is through the empowerment of self-service channels. Instead of irrelevant and outdated articles and FAQs on websites, companies can control the information they present through knowledge management. IT companies can ensure that the information published on the website is precise, clear, and fresh.
Chatbots
Likewise, chatbots help tickets deflect through quick redress customer issues via intelligent decisions. AI-driven chatbots can quickly locate the information desired by a customer and quench the queries presented. Interestingly, the continuously learning behavior of AI-based chatbots helps a more swift resolution experience based on experience.
LiveChat
90% of call center-using businesses feel they can streamline the customer service through LiveChat. Knowledge-empowered quick redressal of customer issues on LiveChat further aids in drastically bringing down the call center traffic.
5 Reduces operational costs
A well-planned digital transformation plan leads to a drastic reduction in operational costs. It enables companies to automate, reorganize, and accelerate operations. Here’s how’s.
Extensive use of tech solutions
Digital transformation increases the use of technologies and automates manual tasks. As iterated above, instead of an agent handling trivial customer problems, an AI-driven chatbot takes its place. Similarly, instead of manually organizing knowledge contained by a company, KM software manages and keeps track of the information created and circulated in any IT organization.
Likewise, intelligent ML solutions take over the analytics to present deep insights into shared data. Overall, digital transformation makes business aspects like customer experience in IT swift and better.
Also, technological solutions like decision tree makers does ensure consistent output. While it does not eliminates the probability of error, it relatively diminishes it. Also, tracking becomes accessible in a technology-driven environment which further helps roll back any discrepancy.
Channelises human labor
Automation frees human labor and empowers the workforce to focus on crucial tasks. For example, advanced AI-driven chatbots can resolve easy-to-medium customer issues, reducing client load. It empowers customer executives to handle complex problems and focus on more prominent budget clients. Likewise, analytics reports provided by ML patterns can be studied by data engineers to create an actionable action plan.
Although digital transformation might invite a bit of capital investment at the start, in most cases, quick results in a reduction in operating costs are visible in the first week itself.
Conclusion
Digital transformation is now more than the need of the hour. Companies are investing in state-of-the-art digital solutions and software to revamp their current operations. Here, it is crucial to discuss the shocking statistics by McKinsey. A staggering 70% of digital transformations fail, with companies unable to reach their large-scale and complex end goals. Therefore, companies must be cautious when initiating a pan-company digital transformation strategy.
A carefully curated and watched digital shift to new technology or platform can catapult a company to unseen growth and progression. Here, experienced partners can help IT companies to actualize the changes expected.
Author Bio
Sowmya Juttukonda
Sowmya is a content developer and digital media specialist at Knowmax, a knowledge base software for enterprises who are seeking to reduce their customer support costs and increase their agent productivity.
