Digital customer service channels

Adding digital customer service channels to the mix.

Digital customer service channels offer diverse options for helping consumers, ranging from high touch to completely self-service. Customers value choice and the wide breadth of digital channel options provides them a lot to choose from.

If you're a business currently exploring digital customer service channel options, you're probably already supporting one digital channel - your website. Customers will frequently self-serve with the information on websites, including store hours, return instructions, and FAQs. Every time a customer can resolve an issue on their own represents an avoided call and likely a satisfied customer.

Along with websites, email support is one of the oldest digital customer service channels, as well as the most frequently used. Forrester reports that 54% of consumers used email in 2018 to receive support. Agent assistance and the ability to include a lot of details are features that appeal to email support users. Our research found that 82% of businesses offer email support, making it almost as common as phone support.

Chat support is also becoming a commonly used digital customer service channel, and it has high satisfaction scores, probably due to the convenience and real-time agent interaction that characterizes chat sessions. A study we conducted in 2018 showed a significant year-over-year increase in the percentage of businesses offering chat support, from 46% in 2017 to 67% the following year. Likewise, consumer adoption increased from 10% to 30% year-over-year.

The fourth channel worth noting in this section is mobile apps. Not every business model lends itself to a mobile app, but for those that do it can be an effective way of providing self-service support. We found that with a 44% satisfaction score, it's one of the highest rated channels.

These four digital customer service channels - websites, email, chat, and mobile apps - are the most mature channels and worth investing in now if business requirements support it.

Digital customer service channels that are gaining ground

There are several newer digital channels that businesses are increasingly adopting but customers aren't widely embracing yet. These include social media, texting, and automated assistants, such as chatbots. As an example of the disconnect, we found that although 59% of companies offer social media support, consumers rate it as one of their least favorite ways to get support.

Emerging digital customer service channels

There are also a couple of digital channels that are in the early stages of their life cycle. Video chat sessions between customers and agents as well as using home assistants like Amazon's Alexa for customer support show promise, but are not widely adopted… yet.