In 2004, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, made a bold move. He relocated the company from San Francisco to Las Vegas so it could better staff its customer service call centers.
“Customer service should not be a department, it should be the entire company,” Tony wrote in the Harvard Business Review. Zappos continues to prioritize building strong relationships with its existing customers.
In an increasingly online world, one major facet of these interactions is digital customer service. Read on to learn more about this strategy, and how to use it to boost your business.
What is digital customer service?
Digital customer service (DCS) is how businesses interface with their consumers to answer questions, fix problems, or address complaints through various digital touchpoints. These include communications via chatbots, social media, email, and video calls with live agents.
The end goal of digital customer service is the same as that of more traditional channels such as call centers: to improve the customer experience and increase brand loyalty by solving your customers’ problems.
Main digital customer service channels
Digital customer service tools generally fall into one of two categories: human-powered and self-service. Human-powered options like live chat and social media require customer service staff to answer customer queries. Self-service options include FAQs and, with the proliferation of artificial intelligence, increasingly sophisticated automated chatbots. Here’s a detailed explanation of each:
Chatbots
Chatbots, also known as conversation bots, are computer programs that imitate human conversation using traditional computer coding and artificial intelligence (AI) technology. These virtual assistants show up as a pop-up messaging window and automatically perform tasks from assisting with order fulfillment to processing returns and answering customer questions.
With rapid developments in AI, conversational chatbots can perform increasingly sophisticated tasks and respond to customer queries in a conversational manner. For this reason, they’ve become an increasingly popular and cost-effective option; in 2022, 88% of customers had at least one conversation with a chatbot.
However, chatbots are unlikely to completely replace human customer service agents. Complex customer service requests—such as highly technical or emotional complaints—often still require bots to defer to human intervention.
Live chat
Live chat and chatbots share the same medium—a messaging pop-up that appears somewhere on your website. Unlike chatbots, however, the customer service representative behind the live chat is a real human agent. While live chat offers several benefits compared to chatbots—including higher customer satisfaction rates and more resolution when it comes to complex complaints—it struggles to compete with chatbots’ cost, response rate, and average speed of resolution.
Social media
When customers come to you with an issue, they will choose the easiest, most effective means of getting that issue resolved. That can mean taking to social media, where they will post their question either publicly to your company pages or privately via a direct message.
Social media platforms have automatic reply functionalities that companies can use as a first response—this works in a similar way to a basic chatbot, offering tailored responses to frequently asked customer questions.
While this limited level of automation can cut down on some staff hours, a personalized reply—even if it’s a quick thank you or apology in response to their comment—often goes a long way in making users and followers feel heard and boosting customer loyalty.
Despite its reputation as a relatively slow option compared to messaging apps, customers view email as a reliable way to resolve their issues. In fact, utilizing email as a primary digital customer service channel could help grow your business. In 2024, research firm Forrester found that companies that invest in email support see a 20% higher return on investment (ROI) compared to those that rely only on other digital channels.
Email comes with the expected drawbacks of a human-powered option—staffing costs, finite capacity, and, particularly in the globalized ecommerce market, limited operating hours.
Online FAQ page
Detailed pages that list the most commonly asked questions about your business, product, or service are a great way to help customers help themselves and solve issues before they escalate. Use customerservice data from your existing channels to identify the most frequent queries. Have a search function or organize it by subject area to help customers navigate and solve their problems.
6 tips for offering high-quality digital customer service
- Employ an omnichannel approach
- Identify your audience
- Be personal
- Emphasize customer convenience
- Ask for feedback
- Close the loop
Here are some tips to help you make the most out of your online customer service solutions:
1. Employ an omnichannel approach
Different types of customers want to communicate through different digital customer service channels. Gen Z consumers may not want to talk to a human at any point during their customer service experience, whereas baby boomers may not trust a chatbot to handle their requests reliably. Diversify your digital touchpoints so you can cater to a variety of customer inquiries through multiple channels.
2. Identify your audience
It’s difficult to know what channel to invest in if you don’t know who makes up your customer base. Using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform can help you identify key customer data like age, location, and where they find you. This way your digital customer support team can focus on the channels that make the most sense for your business.
3. Be personal
In a digital world rife with self-service options, consumers remember businesses that employ a personal, human touch. Whether that means customizing the prompts and responses on the automated reply function of Instagram Messenger or sending tailored follow-up emails to any customerservice request, it’s the little things that make a lasting impression.
Using a customer’s name and describing their purchase can help them feel valued. Confirming you understand their concerns shows your company is properly addressing their issue, even with an automated chatbot.
4. Emphasize customer convenience
Customers are like water: They often seek the path of least resistance. Give them an option that requires a low amount of customer effort to address their concerns. This could be a prominent FAQ page on your website, a chatbot that pops up as soon as they visit your store, or easily accessible social media handles, and a customer support email address.
5. Ask for feedback
Feedback in the form of satisfaction surveys, call logs, or automated rating systems tells your digital customer supportteam what’s working and what’s not, so they can focus on meeting customer expectations.
Customers who are more satisfied with issues like returns are more likely to recommend your brand to others and remain loyal themselves. End customer interactions by asking them for their honest feedback, and have a systematic way of incorporating suggestions into your digital customer service strategy.
6. Close the loop
Circling back with a follow-up email, text, or chat message helps ensure that you have completely handled customer service inquiries while simultaneously offering another opportunity to connect to your customer base with a personalized touch.
Digital customer service FAQ
What does a digital customer service agent do?
Digital customer service agents are responsible for handling incoming customer service requests through digital channels like live chat rooms or social media threads. Due to the variety of these requests—which can include anything from product returns to sizing questions—agents’ responsibilities include offering emotional support and validation as well as solving problems.
What is an example of digital customer service?
There are many digital channels you can use to facilitate customer interactions. You can have chatbots on your app or website to solve simple issues, use trained customer service personnel to tackle the thornier issues on your website and social media, and set up an automated tool for email customer service support.
Does Shopify offer digital customer service tools?
Yes, Shopify offers digital customer service tools including live chat messaging plug-ins and AI chatbots, as well as the ability to add a FAQ page to your site. Additionally, Shopify Inbox is a free iOS and Android app that you can use to manage all the messages from your customers in one place.
