How the Digitization of Customer Experience Unlocks Growth

Digitizing the administrative elements of the customer experience leads to happier customers and better operational efficiency.

Physical record keeping is a cumbersome way to maintain ever-growing archives of customer records and internal data, making record digitization an appealing alternative. Organizations can benefit greatly from implementing such a digitization strategy, using the digitization of customer experience to unlock growth and create more loyal customers while reducing operational risks.

Want to know more about how digitizing the customer experience can help your organization grow? Check out The Complete Guide to Digitization.

What is the digitization of the customer experience?

The digitization of the customer experience means scanning, organizing, and making readily available any customer data, including — though certainly not limited to — forms, receipts, transcripts, and records of interactions in a digital format that can be accessed by the customer or your organization. For example, a medical office may choose to digitize a client’s onboarding form for future use, ensuring that customers will have a streamlined experience the next time they visit the office, as most of their information can be easily retrieved and utilized.

According to Statista, the three leading causes of frustration with customer service in the US are lack of effectiveness, lack of speed, and lack of accuracy. The digitization of documents can help solve each of these issues, enabling customer-facing employees to identify and retrieve customer documents more quickly and efficiently from a digital database than searching physical archives or re-entering data.

Benefits of digitizing the customer experience

The digitization of the customer experience isn’t just about providing better service to customers, it’s also about improving operational productivity and efficiency. In times of recession and economic growth alike, improving internal procedures to promote productivity and efficiency is one of the most direct methods organizations have to grow profit margins. Compiling digital databases of client records — and company records — is one of the easiest ways to unlock such growth.

For starters, it’s easier to scale a digital customer experience than it is to scale an analog one. Physical records have to be kept on-premises and in a secure location, and that takes up space. For organizations scaling up to multiple locations, accessing physical files can become a significant barrier. The problem grows as your organization does. Conversely, digital records stored in the cloud can be retrieved remotely and instantly from any location with secured access.

Which organizational elements can be digitized?

Satisfied customers are loyal customers. However, customer loyalty isn’t an easy thing to earn, and even minor issues can force satisfied customers to pursue different options. A study performed by Harvard Business Review found that, except in rare cases, complete customer satisfaction is the key to securing customer loyalty and generating superior long-term financial performance. So, if you want to keep customers engaged with your brand, you need to take a holistic approach when overhauling your operations. Digitization has other benefits as well, like lowering operational risks and increasing employee efficiency.

Any physical documents produced while handling a customer service issue should be digitized and stored for future reference. This provides a tangible catalog of actions an organization took for a customer, as well as providing employees easy access to information about an issue should it resurface. It can also help identify procedural mistakes internally, like an incorrect SKU that results in a recurring inventory discrepancy.

Other digitized customer records can also come in handy. The more complex a transaction is, the more documentation it will likely require. In some cases, like in real estate transactions, legal retention requirements must be met when a sale is closed or a form is filed. In other cases, it falls to the organization to decide what’s worthy to keep.

Finding the right hardware

Physical documents can be scanned and uploaded to the cloud. Inefficient and inaccurate scanners can hinder internal data digitization, so it’s crucial to pick the right hardware for the job. If you’re scanning hundreds, or even thousands, of documents each day, you’ll want to make sure that you find a scanner that’s accurate, efficient, and well-built. You should also take into account the software features that come with the scanner, specifically optical character recognition and automatic filing naming to make the categorization and management of documents easier.

Our recommendation: fi and SP Series scanners

Those in the market for a high speed document scanner to assist with the digitization of the customer experience have no shortage of options. We take great pride in having spent the last 50+ years researching, designing and developing some of the most advanced and powerful electronics in the world, including our professional grade fi and SP Series scanners.

Built to purpose for the most demanding document handling jobs, fi and SP Series scanners are capable of processing tens-of-thousands of pages per day at the highest levels of accuracy. Their intuitive software and drivers integrate simply with line-of-business software systems and provide an efficient digitization toolset.

The fi and SP Series scanners pack the features organizations need to fully digitize their customer experience, from fast and efficient scan speeds to scanning software that makes managing scans a breeze. With options for organizations of any size, our scanners have what it takes to digitize your business. Click here to learn more or shop our production scanner line.