Building a Bridge Between the Digital Divide

By Mark Smith, SVP, Customer Experience at CSG

Guest AuthorsDigital workspace platformsIntelligent Assistants

By STS News Desk On Jul 4, 2023

As the digital transformation train moves along, the conductors and passengers inside have found themselves at a wide canyon. On one side, we have the purely digital customer experiences, like chatbots, paperless billing, and mobile notifications. On the other side of the canyon, we have the in-person experiences, which include speaking to real people for customer service and receiving bills and offers in the mail instead of through email. If organizations want to keep every passenger on their train happy, they need to build a bridge across the canyon that unifies all types of experiences, regardless of what the passenger (or customer) may prefer. To properly build a bridge, however, you should do your research on how to construct it to facilitate the ideal crossing experience.

Customer experience architects should build a “bridge” capable of allowing customers to go back and forth between digital and physical experiences at will—with the understanding that some will prefer to stop in the middle. Ideally, there should no longer be a gaping divide between the two types of experiences, and they should be linked seamlessly, which requires an in-depth knowledge of what customers want.

Building the Bridge

Like any good architect, when you’re building a customer experience to bridge the digital gap, you should start with a survey of the land. This means you should pinpoint exactly where divides are occurring, and regarding what topics. When it comes to the digital/physical divide, one of the biggest issues is payments. For instance, 74% of consumers would rather set up online bill payments through their bank to automate their payments, as opposed to 26% of consumers who would rather receive their bills in the mail and pay with a physical check. In fact, some consumers are still so unsure about fully modern digitization that even though 85% of people would happily move to digital wallets, 15% prefer to use a credit card to pay bills, even though that comes with a convenience fee.

The divide between the physical and digital widens even more regarding customer service preferences. While 64% of consumers would rather use a virtual assistant application to resolve issues, 36% of consumers would still rather wait on hold to speak with an actual agent regarding their issue. As we venture further into new technology, like the metaverse or self-driving cars, we see numbers closer to a 50/50 split as consumers remain unsure of how different technologies function. Even when both options are a new technology, consumers tend to lean more toward something more familiar, like how 53% of consumers would rather order groceries online and have them delivered by an autonomous robot as compared to 47% of consumers who would rather use a self-driving vehicle take them to and from the grocery store. This is helpful data- it tells customer experience architects that when they’re bridging divides of any kind, the bridge itself should look familiar. Consumers will be less hesitant to cross if they’re confident in the bridge’s stability.

Facilitating the Crossing

“Crossing” the bridge itself is another form a good customer experience executed with ease. When you’re leading customers in one direction or another, it’s important to remember that a bridge goes both ways, and your customer experience should reflect that. While a single customer may prefer to use automated digital billing to take care of the payment portions of their experience, they might shy away from the digital options when it comes to customer support services. In cases like these, your customer should be able to cross the bridge across the digital divide quickly and easily, with the understanding that it’s not a one-way journey. In addition, when considering a bridge that spans a considerable divide, you could have “stops” along the way so that a customer doesn’t have to choose one end or another. When you’re the architect of your customer experience journey, you can create what fits your consumers the best based on research about their preferences.

Ultimately, the bridge itself becomes an important part of the customer experience instead of just being a stopgap in the transition from physical to digital. It will likely be many years (if ever) before every single consumer is completely comfortable with a fully digital experience, so if your aim is to provide holistic customer experiences that serve every consumer regardless of their preferences, then it’s time to get building. Creating a large and impressive “bridge” might sound daunting at first, but when you understand every piece of what consumers may need, a blueprint can quickly come together. Add that to existing customer experience technology, and you’ve got a construction crew already there for you. Don’t let the growing divide between digital and physical preferences discourage you: instead, let it guide you to a bigger and better customer experience.