With crashing oil prices, low levels of growth and alarm bells ringing in China’s trading rooms, many fear that despite recent signs of recovery, the worst is still to come. As governments struggle to get record levels of debt under control many are now turning to technology to educate, inform and provide impartial financial guidance to help build consumer financial resilience and improve financial health. We take a look at three of the most innovative players in this space.
2. Click-to-call
Click-to-call is one of the easiest customer support features to implement, if you already have call centre operations. While this may seem obvious, the most important element is to ensure that the click-to-call phone number works for all users. For example, if your app can be used abroad, include the relevant international calling codes.
3. Searchable FAQs
Instead of providing FAQs grouped by topic or as a long list that can be difficult for users to navigate, consider implementing searchable FAQs. As an added feature, ensure it has offline functionality so that users can readily locate the answer to their question at any time. There are a number of service providers who offer this feature as a software development kit (SDK), making it relatively easy to implement.
4. Guided help
In a recent study, zendesk found that roughly 1 in 5 consumers has used social media at least once to seek a customer service response in the last year. As this is likely to be a growing trend it’s becoming increasingly important to establish and maintain a social media presence.
Interestingly, the demographics of social media users are also changing. While it once could have been assumed that only brands that served millennials needed to focus on social media support, recent research by the Pew Research Centre has proven otherwise. Currently, 64% of internet users aged 50-64 use Facebook and the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is the over 65s.
An Omni-Channel Experience Needs to Consider Customer Support
When designing an omni-channel experience the focus is typically on the sales process and how customers can buy products and services easily through multiple channels. However, it’s important to ensure that the customer experience doesn’t falter when it comes to support.
From a support perspective an omni-channel experience doesn’t need to cover all channels. It’s more important to carefully select relevant channels and ensure that customers receive consistent, high quality service.
For effective self-service, all channels will need to be integrated to provide customers with the same information, messaging and experience regardless of the channel that they’re using.
When it comes to customer service delivery via call centres, email, web chat or social media the information provided, response times and service levels will need to be of a consistently high standard.
So just how “digital” are we?
In many ways, the stats simply do speak for themselves. Nearly 50% of the world’s population currently has access to the Internet. If we look at a developed market such as the UK, that figure jumps to 90% of households. Mobile Internet penetration globally is forecast to reach 71% by 2019 - a stat that would have been unfathomable ten years ago. And gone are the days of waiting ten minutes for some content to download onto your device; Ofcom reports that in the UK 90% of homes now have access to 4G services. Those 4G users are far more likely to be attached to their smartphones, do more data heavy activities and do them more often.
Samsung Pay
One of the key differentiators for Samsung Pay is the incorporation of Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technology, which it acquired through its purchase of LoopPay earlier this year. Whereas Apple Pay and Android Pay require NFC capable payment terminals in store, Samsung Pay can also operate with magnetic stripe terminals, providing compatibility with a considerable number of terminals that don’t yet support contactless payments. This feature gives Samsung Pay broader acceptance, with retailers being able to accept Samsung Pay without having to upgrade their payment terminals.
Another interesting extension of Samsung Pay is the partnership with PayPal which will allow users to purchase apps and content on a select number of Samsung Smart TVs using a stored payment card and PIN authentication.
We are running a short survey to find out what you first think has gone wrong when you're told by an assistant that you can't pay by card. We would love to hear your thoughts.
