What is Digital Customer Service?

Digital customer service (DCS) refers to a customer’s or citizen’s experience when they interact with a business or a government entity through one or more digital touchpoints. This interaction can be to complete a transaction, get an answer to a question, resolve a problem, or seek advice.

A digital customer service journey may include one or more of the following touchpoints.

• Virtual assistants or conversational self-service chat with a chatbot or AI Agent
• Text chat or video chat with a live agent
• Messaging (SMS)
• Messaging apps (e.g., WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat)
• Email
• Social media
• Collaborative web browsing and online form-filling
• Digital self-service

Take for example, Laura Andrews, the busy mom, who looks at blogposts by other moms to research for the right insurance plan, buys the insurance online, looks at the FAQ on the company website and video chats for customer service.

Today’s customers are “born digital” and they prefer to be “digital-first” when they interact with businesses, government entities, or even friends and relatives (ala Tik Tok, Facebook, whatsapp, and more). So it makes sense for business entities to meet customers where they “live.” The Covid-19 pandemic further accelerated the digital transformation of customer service. In fact, in an eGain customer service survey, conducted by Dimensional Research, 80% of consumers said that they increased the use of digital customer service —92% of Gen Z, 87% of millennials, and even 69% of baby boomers. Businesses that excel in providing digital customer service in a unified, knowledgeable way will have an advantage over the competition in this new world.

Businesses implement digital channels to provide service to consumers where they “live” and reduce the cost of live assistance. While digitalization of customer engagement had started a while ago, the pandemic acted as an accelerant. Businesses rushed to add digital channels because it was the need of the hour. By adding new digital silos, many companies have created disjointed islands of context, knowledge bases, and automation. Which explains why 57% of consumers in the Dimensional Research survey said that they felt confused by customer service chatbots as the answers the bots gave were different from the answers they got at other touchpoints.

Instead of making it easy to get customer service, these channels increased customer effort.

1. A government agency deflected up to 70% of incoming calls to virtual assistance, reduced case handling time by 25%, and improved form-filling with cobrowse-aided phone and chat conversations and granular knowledge assistance within forms. No wonder these powerful capabilities elevated their agent engagement to 92% versus the industry benchmark of 67%!

2. Leading financial services company serves over 11 million members with personalized, proactive, outbound messaging across SMS, email, voice, in-app notifications, and letters. They send over a billion notifications—800 different kinds—per year with our messaging solution, wowing members with a high level of service. No wonder they are a perennial number one in their industry in the Forrester CX Index rankings, among other benchmarks!

3. Name-brand retailer serves over 9 million shoppers across geographies with rich digital customer service, including virtual assistance, live chat, and digital deflection of IVR contacts, all backed by knowledge, AI, and analytics. The retailer has successfully deflected up to 60% of calls to virtual assistance and 40% of contacts from the IVR to contextual digital self-service amidst shipping delays in the holiday shopping season.

Digital Customer Service Predictions and How to Excel

We predict that demand for digital customer service will continue to grow exponentially. AI is accelerating this trend, pulling along with it the demand for a trusted knowledge foundation to deliver correct, consumable, and compliant answers at scale.

Offer: Risk-free pilot

Try our one-of-a-kind, risk-free production pilot—not a toy sandbox—so you and your team can experience our digital customer solution free of charge and obligation.

Featured Video

eGain CEO, Ashu Roy, shares how eGain makes it possible to provide consumers the easy, quick, and guided digital customer service they want.

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