There are seemingly millions of things available at the push of a button or a screen tap. Tap your screen, you snap a photo. Tap it another time, the photo is online for the world to see. Touch a certain icon, you can chat with a friend, transfer money
overseas, or contact your bank’s customer support.
Pretty much everything is on-demand these days, and customers prefer it that way. In an ironic twist of events, self-serve experiences are considered “premium,” while having someone else do something for you (like paying your bills or changing
your account information) is obsolete and burdensome. Heaven forbid a millennial have to use their phones to actually make a phone call.
When customers want to engage and complete a task, successful companies know how to deliver a seamless experience. When that experience uses technology, the success of the delivery lies in a proper, human-centric software strategy.
When customers want to do something (e.g., pay a bill, schedule an appointment, see the status of their order), they want to do it now. We live in an on-demand world. Software can help businesses fulfill customers’ immediate needs while simultaneously
minimizing the internal resources necessary to do so.
How On-Demand Services Benefit Both Your Customers and Your Company
Why do people prefer to do as many things as possible on their own, without going to a physical location or calling a support line? Mainly because it saves them time: they can pay the bills, buy groceries, open a bank account, transfer money from
another bank, check old invoices, and even get a life insurance policy—all in less than half an hour and in just a few clicks.
Not so long ago, many of these tasks would have taken a day or more to accomplish. The customer would have had to drive to multiple companies, spend time waiting in line, and make sure to bring the appropriate documentation, etc..
Self-serve technology has made our lives as consumers easier and more convenient. But on-demand services aren’t ideal just for the customers. They’re beneficial for the company offering them, in the form of saved time and money.
When customers can complete tasks—from simple to complex—on their own, through software, they can do so whenever their schedule allows. More importantly, they can do so without the time and the resources of the business’s team. Paying
a bill at the company’s headquarter takes at least five minutes of a teller’s time. Generating a customer’s invoice by manually inputting all the data can take an operator 15 minutes or more. Worse yet, all these actions are
prone to human error.
Software can handle routine tasks so the humans are freed up to help on more complex cases. For an organization, this can mean a lot of money saved. For your team, it can mean less time wasted on menial tasks and more time to focus on complex
matters, like strategy.
Custom software can create on-demand services and experiences and, in the process, save your company and your customers time and money. Better yet, when your customers get the experiences and the service they want, they’re more likely to
stay loyal to your brand. This means that custom software for on-demand services can do more than save you money; it can bring additional revenue too.
However, things aren’t as easy as having a chatbot written from scratch and waiting for rave reviews from your customers to pour in. As always, things are a bit more complicated.
Signs You Might Need Custom Software
Is your team always answering the same questions or helping customers with the same tasks? See whether custom software could help streamline things for you and your customers.
Custom Software Can Work Wonders—But Only under Certain Conditions
There is one critical component of custom software that most companies ignore: a comprehensive plan. Without it, your software will underperform and all the benefits listed above will go unrealized.
If your custom software doesn’t actually make things easier for your customers, they will get frustrated and end up calling support or driving to your physical location anyway. Worse yet, they might switch to a competitor that offers better digital experiences. 8 in 10 customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. Are you ready to offer it to them?
In order to answer yes to the question above, you need a fully thought-out plan. You need to know what your custom software needs to do and for whom. You need to understand your customers, who’s using your software, what they’re trying to accomplish, and the challenges they face.
Lastly, even though we’re using technology, everything still needs to be human-centric. Your software needs to answer human needs and it needs to do so in a way that’s easy for human users to understand. At Far Reach, we like to think about the software we create for our customers as a person, not a program. What’s the role of the software? How will you measure performance? How can adding or enhancing software improve other team members’ jobs?
More importantly, we like to think about the software we develop as a person because this will help us make it feel more human. When a user interacts with custom software built this way, they almost feel like a real person is guiding them through the process. Technology doesn’t have to take the human element out of customer service, instead it should optimize it.
Are your customers wanting self-service and access to your business on-demand? Custom software could be a differentiator.
Reach out.