Digital Customer Service: The Ultimate Guide for 2025

Digital customer service is shaping the present and future as customers go online, even for traditional brick-and-mortar businesses.

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Modern customers don’t reach out for support at the first sign of an issue. They want to communicate with businesses on digital channels such as—email, live chat, messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

76% of shoppers expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company’s customer support team.

Hence, digital transformation and digital customer service go hand in hand.

Usually, before purchasing a product, people choose to read the reviews. So your company must have a site where they can find those reviews or else they will reach out to the help desk. If you fail to respond instantly, it can cause dissatisfaction.

Let us discuss the key strategies of digital customer service that can improve satisfaction index.

Table of Content

1 What is Digital Customer Service (DCS)?
2 Key Benefits of Digital Customer Service
3 9 Best Practices to Deliver Digital Customer Service
4 Digital Customer Service Trends
5 Top Digital Customer Service Tools
6 Examples of Digital Customer Service
7 Skyrocket Your CX with Effective Digital Customer Support Strategy
8 FAQs on digital customer service

What is Digital Customer Service (DCS)?

Digital Customer Service includes all customer support interactions that occur through digital channels, including email, live chat, social media, mobile apps, chatbots, and self-service platforms. It represents a comprehensive approach to customer assistance that leverages technology to provide seamless, efficient, and accessible support across multiple digital touchpoints.

The businesses implementing effective DCS strategies gain significant advantages in customer retention and operational efficiency. The shift from traditional support channels to digital platforms allows businesses to scale their customer service operations while maintaining quality and consistency in their interactions.

Key objectives:

Maximizing customer satisfaction through immediate, accessible support across all digital channels while maintaining consistency in service quality.
Optimizing operational efficiency through automation, self-service options, and intelligent routing of customer inquiries.
Leveraging customer interaction data to continuously improve service delivery and predict future customer needs.
Creating seamless, omnichannel experiences that maintain context and personalization across all digital touchpoints.

Key Benefits of Digital Customer Service

Positive customer service experience encourages clients to increase their purchases from any company. It even pushes customers to pay a premium of at least 13% for high-end services.

Enhance Customer Trust and Loyalty: Digital customer service creates strong emotional connections with your customers. It enhances your customer’s trust and loyalty to buy from you again.
Time Efficiency: Customer service is essential since automating it may save time and boost productivity. It reduces operational costs, saves the company’s resources and ensures a seamless experience for the customers.
Increase Digital Consumer Engagement: Traditional customer service wastes the company’s and the client’s time with personal information questionnaires, face-to-face confirmation. Digitalization has improved customer experience as well as reduced time by updating their account and information on their own time.
Acquire Meaningful Feedback: Customers like to provide feedback when it is integrated naturally into the experience that they are having with the product. It also adds an extra point to attract more consumers and increase customer loyalty.

9 Best Practices to Deliver Digital Customer Service

64% of companies with a customer-focused CEO believe they are more profitable than their competitors. Hence you need to have a solid strategy in place and to deliver digital customer care across all interactions.

1. Provide Omnichannel Customer Service Experience

Adding more chat options in your system will make it easier for customers. Massaging is quick, one-on-one, accessible from anywhere, safe, and asynchronous. It will increase a more personalized experience for customers.

HBR research found that omnichannel customers spend 10% more online as well as 4% more in-store than single-channel customers.

IKEA is known for providing customers with exceptional shopping experiences and they continue to expand the channels inside their omnichannel strategy. They offer customers a “Click and Collect” option that seamlessly transitions online orders to in-store pickup. When customers check out and select this option, they can choose the location to pick up their order.

For example, a person can gather information about a product when he is on the way to the office through messaging. That time, a live video call may be a frustrating thing for him.

You can open your company’s Facebook page to receive any kind of complaints, orders, or positive reviews on the product.
Moreover, you can link WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram links in your “Contact with Us” features.

2. Offer Self-Service Portal for 24×7 Support

Around 80% of customers anticipate a self-service site or content. Virtual engagement of consumers has increased a lot during the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to Microsoft, 90% of customers globally expect brands or organizations to have an online self-service customer support portal.

Whenever they visit a site to purchase something, they try to find out about that product themselves. It’s simple to assist your customer. Moreover, it enhances customer engagement with the website.

You can add a “Self-Service Portal” page to interact with your support team from the customer’s account team. It provides business, product, and account history and support request progress updates.
You may also include support materials like a FAQs section, webinars, and a knowledge base. From these resources, customers may discover answers without speaking to support staff.

3. Employ Right Customer Support Staff

It’s vital to hire the right help desk candidate. Since these candidates refer to your company, they must be understanding and empathetic. Go out of traditional channels and select the right candidates.

They must have the patience to handle consumers calmly. Moreover, they must know the basic technical methods and have listening skills.

In your job advertisements, you can post what expertise you need for your customer service.
Hiring allows you to find someone with new skills and expertise. You should hire someone with different skills to give your business something new.
Lastly, during the interview time, ask your customer service staff what training or procedures they want to learn. By doing this, you may understand their skill levels.

4. Maximize the Use of AI & Automation Tools

An AI chatbot may promote your self-service alternatives by suggesting help center content. It also directs customers to where they may get instantaneous help, whether by email, chat app, product page, or checkout.

More than 88% of users had at least one conversation with a chatbot in 2022.

It handles your routine inquiries. Bots allow support staff to devote more time to issues that need customer’s involvement. It enables 24/7 customer service. It will improve digital interactions between you and your customers.

You can buy chatbots from various platforms or build your own.
Then, connect chatbots to your back-end systems. It enables them to access client information and make suggestions and recommendations based on users’ characteristics and past interactions.

5. Use Technology to Assess Customer Experience and Agent Performance

Customer service department performance relies on key performance metrics. Set a benchmark of customer service KPIs and other measurements, such as post-call customer surveys, hold times, transferred calls, and call drops to smooth customer journey.
You can also measure agent performance by the average number of problems or tickets resolved and customer happiness score.

In your support team, you can add CRM systems. CRM systems handle customer data and give sales funnel analytics. Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho, and On Pipeline are the best tools for managing CRM systems.
Compared to PBX phone systems, cloud-based phone system software offers more voice-calling functions. You can get help from the Air call cloud phone vendor.

6. Connect Support Tool Data

Agents can’t customize interactions at giant firms with vast client bases since data is walled and spread across systems. Customer support tools work efficiently with your team’s tech stack to condense client data.

It helps businesses sync data across cloud-based apps. Agents may predict and customize services using consumer information. Besides, they will reach customer touchpoints.

Tray.io is a useful tool for delivering support to your users. It’s a low-code general automation platform, so it will be easy for you.
If you face a problem connecting SOA, SaaS, and APIs, you can add the Anypoint Platform tool to enhance user experience.

7. Analyze Data in Real Time

You can better meet the demands of your digital audience by adopting a data-driven strategy for the digital experience consumers have with your brand. Utilize all the customer online channels to collect the data.

Observing customer interactions in real-time helps to determine which strategies work best and make improvements. Real-time data analysis in today’s fast-paced society is paramount because it lets you learn about customer happiness, effort, conversion, and bounce rates.

You can add the Mixpanel tool to analyze customers’ interaction with your product.
Next, connect with Google Analytics to help you understand which works better as users A/B test their website or app’s landing pages.

8. Be Available on Multiple Channels

Around eighty percent of buyers use multiple channels during the journey. Thus, being present in various media may significantly affect sales. While extra tracks may seem like a good idea, using more than necessary might waste time and energy.

According to marketers, most effective marketing campaigns employ four to six media. It will help to boost the authority of your business and ensure a proper digital customer experience.

In your interface, you can add multiple channels like live chat, social media, messaging apps, video chat, etc.
Customer care bots handle 85% of conversations. When clients wish to talk to someone to clear up their questions in difficult situations, you need to have a human agent rather than depend on chatbots.

Digital Customer Service Trends

After such a challenging year, the need to provide excellent customer service is more apparent than ever. Here are some emerging trends in customer service that will help businesses improve their support capabilities:

Social Media

Modern companies need social media for marketing and customer service. Social media is where customers find companies, shop, and purchase. They naturally expect corporations to help them on these platforms. More than sixty percent of US social media users prefer it over email and phone because social media simplifies customer service.

24/7 Live Chat

Live chat is the best approach to assist customers in getting what they need and resolving any issues by delivering accurate information and real-time help. It will minimize live customer support agent load, save time, and improve customer happiness.

Proactive Service to Customers

Proactive customer assistance addresses problems, complaints, and unreasonable customer requests and solves problems before they happen. This service minimizes client dissatisfaction. If consumers know in advance about shipment delays, new items, tracking information, and delivery dates, ecommerce customer service is a big step toward a positive customer experience.

Co-browsing

Co-browsing is a great new way to assist clients. Co-browsing lets agents and customers navigate any online page together. Co-browsing and video chat allow agents to personalize online shopping. It’s secure since the agent can’t view any other data on the client’s device throughout the connection. Agents may start co-browsing when consumers accept.

Enhance Omnichannel Support with Unified Dashboards

Today’s consumers demand cross-channel experiences. A centralized dashboard where agents can access client data from chat, email, and phone brings all support channels together. A unified dashboard allows you to coordinate your many channels and points of contact with customers to provide a smooth integration.

Top Digital Customer Service Tools

Choosing the right digital customer service tool is very important based on the requirements and usage.

1. Omni24

Omni24 is an omnichannel customer experience management platform that helps businesses engage with customers at their preferred channels in real time and address their concerns. It offers a range of features including live chat, email marketing, and knowledge management to help businesses create personalized and effective customer experiences.

Key features:

Omnichannel inbox: Allows to engage with customers across their preferred digital channels (live chat, social media, messaging apps) and deliver excellent digital customer service experience.
Knowledge base: Help customers to help themselves without even reaching out to you with a comprehensive knowledge base comprising of solutions for the common queries customers might face.
AI chatbots: Provide real time digital customer care, 24×7 when your support team is not available. Connecting with customers and addressing their queries in real time deliver a better experience.
Feedback surveys: Conducting feedback surveys helps in understanding customer expectations and the gaps in customer service strategy so that you can improve the areas significantly.
SLA management: Empower your support agents to plan effectively toward meeting their goals and digital customer service standards.

2. Veemo

Veemo offers a conversational customer engagement suite for businesses to manage their customer interactions effortlessly. From attracting new leads to nurturing them through the entire lifecycle, Veemo helps businesses keep track of their customer journey in a single, easy-to-use platform.

Omnichannel help desk & ticketing: Engage your customers across their preferred channels in real time and resolve their issues. It delivers a great digital customer service experience.
Self service knowledge base: Offering customers a comprehensive knowledge base helps them to resolve their issues instantly without connecting to the support staff.
Advanced routing & workflows: Helps in directing customer requests to the right team/agent to deliver relevant responses with minimum wait time.

3. Acquire.io

Acquire is one of the best digital customer service tools for swift, streamlined, and satisfying customer service. It consolidates all of your digital channels into a single interface, enhancing agent efficiency and the quality of the customer service they give.

Acquire uses automation that helps you standardize your approach to customer service, decrease response times to support requests, and maximize your return on investment.

4. GrooveHQ

GrooveHQ is a customer support platform with a shared inbox and knowledge base. It is designed for a small customer service team to save time and react swiftly to consumers with basic automation settings, including ticket routing, tagging, and prefabricated answers.

You may develop a branded self-service knowledge base to minimize ticket traffic and provide essential support 24/7. Groove also integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, etc.

Read more: While Groove HQ is a popular choice, there are several competitors worth considering. See how they compare in our Groove HQ alternatives roundup.

5. Glia

Glia is revolutionizing the way companies provide digital assistance to their consumers. Glia’s Digital Customer Service (DCS) solution improves interactions with businesses through the web and mobile devices by introducing digital communication channels, in-app teamwork, and AI-powered support. Glia enhances customer experience and business outcomes.

Examples of Digital Customer Service

Are you still confused about accepting digital customer service for your company? Then you can take these companies as an example for boosting your confidence.

Amazon

The world’s largest online retailer is Amazon. It is impossible to gain without truly emphasizing consumers’ interests and behavior.

Amazon’s business model had to integrate as it introduced additional items. Amazon lets you purchase anything in your native language with local currency. Amazon also launched Alexa, an AI virtual assistant for vocal search queries.

Its powerful system predicts what customers want and provides it upfront, enticing them to spend more. One-click purchases, speedy international shipping, a simple return policy, and 24/7 customer support keep people returning to the shop for their favorites.

Instacart

Instacart, a data-driven startup, connected its customer assistance solution with capabilities to combine consumer data such as contact details, recent purchases, vouchers, and credit balances.

Shoppers might also contact Instacart’s support staff more efficiently. Customers may now update orders through a live chat with representatives. The company’s online help resources are helpful.

Instacart has a 90% satisfaction rate with 175,000 monthly digital customer support requests.

Uber

Uber is one of the best digital customer service examples. Uber employees have pain points. They can remove each of the annoyances that cab-hailing customers experience.

Since you can track a cab in real time, waiting for it is no longer a hassle. Passengers and drivers rating each other is a great way to satisfy customer and business partner expectations. Credit cards are also acceptable. It is so convenient if you are carrying less cash with you.

Skyrocket Your CX with Effective Digital Customer Support Strategy

Digital customer service is a great way to connect with consumers. Customers and brands benefit from its efficacy. Walk a mile in your audience’s virtual shoes to discover their desires. You may learn much about how your potential customers find and engage with your brand by simulating a simple buyer’s journey. For this, you need to know the latest trends and strategies. After that, try to simplify each touchpoint. This method will lead to increased satisfaction among consumers.

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Tushar Joshi

Tushar Joshi is a passionate content writer at Omni24, where he transforms complex concepts into clear, engaging and actionable content. With a keen eye for detail and a love for technology, Tushar Joshi crafts blog posts, guides and articles that help readers navigate the fast-evolving world of software solutions.

FAQs on digital customer service

Why is it necessary to prioritize client service?

Keeping customers satisfied is essential to maintaining a successful company or product. For the best online experience, companies are investing in technology. It’s necessary to meet clients’ needs.

What makes digital customer service so appealing to customers?

Customers’ busy schedules are more amenable to digital customer service. Companies connect their customer services with social media. With the help of these media, you can quickly solve consumers’ problems or guide them. So, digital customer service becomes hassle-free and provides quick service.

Is the customer service tool user-friendly?

Customer service software’s installation ease relies on numerous aspects. The implementation complexity depends on your intended integrations, customizations, and other considerations.

Do the agents have access to teamwork features?

The top customer support software app gives agents collaboration capabilities and simplifies processes so they can work together and answer client inquiries faster.

Should you include customer satisfaction surveys?

The organization learns more about client preferences and needs from the best and worst surveys. It helps figure out when and why to conduct surveys. For optimal customer satisfaction, it’s crucial to know when to send out the best and worst surveys.