Encouraging your customers to go digital

In today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world, the way businesses communicate with their customers is constantly evolving. Digital communications, offering speed, efficiency, cost savings, and environmental benefits, are increasingly becoming the standard.

However, transitioning customers from traditional paper-based methods to digital alternatives presents challenges. Despite the undeniable advantages, many customers remain attached to paper, either due to habit, lack of awareness, or perceived benefits. We explore strategies that can help businesses encourage customers to embrace digital communication while considering their concerns and motivations.

Digital communications provide significant advantages over traditional paper-based methods, whether that’s cost savings, quicker to implement, increased and trackable customer engagement or sustainability reasons. However, understanding customer behaviour in terms of their motivations and potential barriers is important so that you can develop the right strategy for your customers. This will then enable you to focus on strategies that will encourage the transition to digital. For example, exclusive content may work well for some customers, but others may need something more tangible like monetary incentives.

Strategies could include

• Incentives are particularly advantageous when a customer may feel the company is benefitting from cost-savings
• Education and awareness through workshops or tutorials to inform your customers
• Simplifying your processes so that it’s easy for customers to switch, ensuring your platform is flexible, user-friendly and mobile optimised
• Building trust to address privacy concerns and being transparent on how you collect and use data. Alongside this, you need to ensure a robust customer support system is in place and accessible online, to facilitate those transitioning
• Highlight the environmental impact on switching from paper to digital
• Leverage technology that facilitates quick and convenient communication, such as SMS or WhatsApp

Of course, measuring and reporting on your strategies is vital to record what is working or where improvements can be made. Customer feedback is crucial at this stage to ensure you understand all blockers or complexities for a customer to make the switch.

At APS, we can guide your organisation through this process and our team are on hand to advise at every step to ensure a smooth and effective transition for your cutomers and greater digital adoption.

You can download the full version of this report below for more information.