According to AIIM’s 2014 report “Paper Wars,” 68% of professionals surveyed agreed that business “at the speed of paper” will be unacceptable in a few years’ time. In a society where instant gratification rules and putting the customer on hold is a cardinal sin, paper processes are becoming increasingly difficult to manage. For many businesses, paper processes ultimately translate to inefficiency—and inefficiency creates a strain on customer service.
Poor customer service comes with a high price tag for businesses. According to ClickSoftware, poor customer experiences lose US enterprises $83 billion annually in the form of defections and abandoned purchases. Additionally, 64% of customers disclosed that customer service is more important than price in deciding whether to do business with a company, and more than half of customers would pay extra for guaranteed better service.
The consensus is clear: customer service is important to people. And in an age where the average consumer can easily voice his opinions loud and clear across several channels with the click of a button (think Yelp, Twitter, LinkedIn and Amazon, to name a few) providing exceptional service has become a non-negotiable. It’s also important to improve customer service before you lose customer—not as a response to losing them—as it costs anywhere between 4 and 10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one.
According to AIIM research, improvements to a company’s paper processes result in an average increase in response times by a factor of 4.6, oftentimes reducing days to mere hours, or hours to minutes. Thus, reducing paper and creating efficient business processes can have a dramatic effect on customer service. Ultimately, it could mean the difference between keeping happy, satisfied customers and losing disgruntled customers to competitors.
Here are 4 main ways that streamlining your document processes and reducing paper in your business help improve customer service:
- Keep customer information accurate and updated. Paper processes make keeping information relevant and updated difficult. With document management, it’s much easier to keep your customers’ information up to date, ensure you have the most recent version of a document and avoid losing important information.
- Quickly respond to customer needs. If a customer needs information from a document, having it readily available from your document management system is a much faster, more efficient way to retrieve it than having to search through file cabinets, or worse, requesting the files from an offsite location.
- Collaborate better with co-workers. Document management allows for easy, smart communication throughout the company. With improved collaboration, responding promptly and accurately to customer needs is much more feasible.
- Harness data to gauge success. Tracking customer interactions, feedback and other valuable data is much easier to do through a document management system than through a paper trail. Quickly get insights into what is and is not working so you can respond appropriately to keep customers happy.
Ready to start improving customer service with document management? Contact a PSIGEN representative today to find out how our software can benefit your business.
