Transforming Customer Support: The Journey to Becoming a Digital-First Organization 9532

Transforming Customer Support: The Journey to Becoming a Digital-First Organization

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At the forefront of digital transformation in Customer Support, organizations are embracing digital-first strategies to elevate customer experiences while streamlining operations. This blog introduces us to our transformative journey and the impact of AI-driven solutions, omnichannel support systems, and data analytics in meeting customer needs. Alongside these innovations, we'll address challenges and emphasize collaboration and customer-centricity on this process towards digital excellence in customer support.

Our lives are increasingly digital. The role of a good Customer Support organization is to be there when you need us, to show up in the manner you want us to support you. In the last few decades, that has meant embracing increasingly digital-first customer experiences, streamlining processes to reduce customer efforts and giving faster answers to inquiries. At Blackbaud we continually transform our technology and approaches to support you, our cherished customers. This journey of transformation demands both our commitment and your partnership as we navigate the intricacies of digital transformation together.
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Embracing digital transformation

What does digital transformation in customer support look like in the digital age? The seamless integration of various digital channels such as chatbots, social media, email, and self-service portals. These technologies enable us to offer real-time assistance, round-the-clock support, and personalized interactions – through the channels for assistance preferred by more customers.

More than just integrating new tools; we’re redefining our approach to customer support. By navigating uncharted waters on the frontier of Support technology, we aim to exceed your expectations once again by fusing artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and automation. Our aim by exploring these frontiers? Create an experience for you where digital transformation gives you the tools you expect to accomplish tasks, interacting with our Support and getting back to your job as efficiently as possible.
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Elevating Customer Experience

What kind of speedy and personalized interactions are we prioritizing for today’s hyper-connected world? First, we're empowering seamless and tailored experiences through AI-powered chatbots that address routine inquiries promptly. We’re also piloting Generative AI assistance in our Knowledgebase. These technologies allow our highly trained human agents to focus on more complex or intricate issues, contributing to swifter resolutions and heightened satisfaction. This orchestration of AI-empowered technologies and human interactions aims to ensure every customer interaction is a harmonious blend of efficiency and personalization.
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Reducing Customer Efforts

A successful digital-first customer support organization aims always to reduce customer effort. We're committed to providing you with the tools to independently find solutions through self-service portals, intuitive user interfaces, and a robust Knowledgebase. Digital transformation also breaks free from conventional business hours. AI chatbots and self-service portals can provide support around the clock, ensuring your needs are met at the time most convenient to you. We aim to enhance satisfaction and improve service speeds, while finding the balance between self-service resources, automation, and the human touch.
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Overcoming Challenges

Maintaining consistent service quality across our Support channels poses a challenge we’re meeting head on. While a digital-first customer support strategy offers substantial benefits to customers, we anticipate challenges in finding the right blend of human and technology support. Throughout this journey, we'll address challenges of ensuring you experience a human touch in an automated world while also maintaining and heightening data security, integrating legacy systems, and continually training our workforce.

While digital transformation is exciting, we understand that some customers still prefer direct human interaction. The shift towards self-service technology over live agent interactions can leave some feeling disconnected. We want to give you plenty of opportunities to give feedback. You will hear from us in the coming months about the ease of use and the time-saving advantages of self-service options and automation. Please, use these opportunities to provide feedback on your experience, use Knowledgebase ratings and customer surveys to help us improve the quality of our content and the service we provide you.

In conclusion, we hope the journey of continual digital transformation of our customer support organization is a rewarding process for you, our customer. Our goal is to seamlessly increase availability of support resources as we grow. Automation and AI processes accommodate increased demand without sacrificing quality. Maintaining top-tier support quality for our customers as we grow remains the cornerstone of our approach.
News Community News 04/23/2024 10:00am EDT

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7 Comments

I am a 30 year veteran teacher and school administrator which experience with the use of multiple education management systems. Not only is your system one of the most non-user friendly systems I have used throughout the years but the integration of AI has made the experience that much more inefficient. We wear many “hats” at the schools and already have a ton on our plate. In making the search for knowledge a greater waste of time for us you have in essence made our work more difficult. Bring back the experiences support staff you used to have; they at least were quicker at helping us get back to our work.

Personally (like most folks who have commented to this post), I feel more connected and find that finding a resolution to an issue is more likely when I talk to someone (yes, old school; but, works). I find the support staff I've interacted with over the years (some quite familiar as I interact with them often) are very knowledgeable and personable and I hope they will be able to retain their jobs. I've even noticed a last few time that the chat (text) support quality has even gone down quite a bit, let alone AI chatbot. It seems that the text chat has been outsourced to (most likely) India where the folks do not have much product knowledge and just responding with standard knowledgebase articles without having in-depth knowledge of the product they are working with unlike the experienced phone support staff do (who have been with Blackbaud for a long time). I remember experiencing this with another vendor a long time ago (before even explosion of AI & chatbots) where the company outsourced support to another country (to save money); As a result, the support quality went down the drain. So much so, they had to bring back corporate support back to North America to their trained staff as they started losing corporate customers. Just like everyone else, before jumping into the AI bandwagon BlackBaud really need to think and iron out the details / issues.

my 2 cents worth….

John Bozek John Bozek Apr '24

“Agent”, “Agent”, “Agent”

Not one time has the AI chat helped me. Well, I can even say not many times has a live support person been able to help. 9 times out of 10 if not 10 out of 10 times, I am told that this product cannot do what I need and to put in an idea in the idea bank. There is so much missing from this program. I wish the focus was on the actual product and making it better rather than new AI that is just a service to get in the way.

Thanks for the feedback, and for letting us know some of the challenges you are facing. I see you have quite a few cases open. I'll have someone take a look and follow up on your specific issue. Regarding our product innovation, I’d recommend registering for the upcoming Product Upcoming Briefings: https://www.blackbaud.com/product-update-briefings

It really does seem like a miss to invest in AI when their existing core tools are so far below the industry standard.

I'm hoping all the talented, patient support staff I've interacted with over the years will be able to retain their jobs or move on to other suitable positions within Blackbaud. I have very little confidence in AI through my own personal experiences, and I see this as a disservice and downgrade for clients. Luckily, the Community here can and will continue to support each other in ways that I don't believe the “improved” resources will.

I want to share my sincere appreciation for your words, it is great to see you have received quality support from our teams. The internal team here at Blackbaud that you’re working with will be supporting our Knowledgebase creation and more complex cases as we continue to provide the quality customer service that you’re familiar with today.

Our agents are the backbone of our support organization, they are responsible for creating and updating the content and knowledge that our technology is processing to generate the answers for your questions.

Personally, I do like the chat help box idea. Usually, If there is an issue that can't be resolved through chat, there is usually an opportunity to talk to someone. This seems like a good idea to me.

Hi Debbie - if you haven't seen it, Matt just posted about the updates to our chat experience yesterday: https://community.blackbaud.com/blogs/61/9522 Thanks again for your feedback!

Matt Lacy Matt Lacy Apr '24

We appreciate your feedback and partnership. This is exactly our goal; enhancing your experience and simplify the way you can get answers faster.

Great news - we are making updates to our chat experience next week that will enhance the experience even further. Once live we'll post a blog here with more information!

Call me “old school” or “old fashioned”, but I absolutely can't stand it when I get a chatbot for customer service! I would argue every point above is why you should NOT use digital customer service solutions. If I have to ask, and re-ask, a chatbot 4 or 5 times a question and get the wrong answer every time, it creates friction, frustration, and animosity towards your product or service. If I talk (or chat) with a live customer solutions rep, I have a much greater satisfaction of being able to explain the question or situation and get the right assistance the first time.

Thanks for your feedback, we want to improve your experience interacting with Customer Support. Since we launched our Virtual Assistant Chatbot in the summer of 2023, we have collected and analyzed the feedback from our customers, and that is why we have introduced Generative AI capabilities in our KB Search page (you can find more details here: https://community.blackbaud.com/blogs/61/9492), and we will integrate these capabilities with our Virtual Assistant Chatbot very soon.

Our goal is to reduce the customer efforts to get answers for known issues or how-to questions, you will always have access to our SMEs for either unknown or complex scenarios. We want to provide a blended experience where we combine our expertise and knowledge with leading technologies.

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