Your customers’ happiness is the foundation of your brand. As such, every customer interaction matters and your team needs to look at every email, chat message, or sales proposal as an opportunity to drive growth and success. One of the easiest ways to encourage this mindset is to implement technologies that minimise boring and tedious tasks that take away from your employees’ creative and critical thinking time.
For example, a document management system (DMS) works wonders for customer service efforts because it makes paperwork easier to deal with and client interactions more human-centric. Consider the following ways you can use your document management system to maximise these efforts:
Quicker customer response
It can be frustrating to wait several minutes for a response from a customer service representative. In fact, it's usually one of the top complaints in any review forum. Based on a 2017 survey, poor customer service experience will lead 52% of customers to tell family and friends about the experience, 54% will ask that their concerns be escalated to a supervisor or manager, and 56% will never do business with the company again.
How can you avoid situations like that? Decrease the amount of time it takes your staff to find relevant documents and information. A proper DMS allows you to search by keywords within a document, dates, assignees, and half a dozen other factors — even if your employees are searching scanned documents!
Optimised workflow
Creating, modifying, or archiving documents takes a surprising amount of time and effort. Even documents that are managed electronically require lots of attention. New versions need to be saved for each set of draft changes, staff need to manually transfer files via email or chat, and archived documents need to be stored in the right place. Adding a DMS to the mix alleviates those issues.
A managed DMS solution makes it possible to create automated document workflows, whereby files are ushered through predetermined steps with almost no human input. Each step is transparent, tasks proceed more efficiently, and customers receive answers swiftly.
Cost efficiency
The cost efficiency of having a document management system may not seem like it concerns your customers, but from an operations standpoint, spending less money on manual processes frees up time and resources for more human interaction.
For example, would you encourage your employees to limit the length of time they spend interacting with customers to improve profit margins? No way. Speaking directly to customers is a prime opportunity to improve your reputation and if people are waiting on hold because you can’t afford more representatives, something needs to change.
Better security
Customers want to be confident that their information is safe. An up-to-date DMS centralises all your corporate data, documents, and customer information so you can focus more of your efforts on protecting a single platform versus several.
Centralisation also prevents delays and inconsistency that can cause issues with regulatory compliance. Your security policies will be easy to manage and document, proving to customers that the privacy and security of their information is just as important to you as it is to them.
Easier collaboration
As documents accumulate from various people, locations, and mediums, collaboration can become a painful bottleneck. A DMS solution solves this by simplifying how collaborators create, search for, and share files. Authorized access can also be enabled for external users, especially when working on projects that need direct customer input.
Customers are constantly looking for something newer, faster, and more convenient. With a DMS like SharePoint and the help of experienced IT professionals, your team can be more dynamic, and motivated to satisfying your customers' demands. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how you can use SharePoint to boost your overall customer experience.