The 2021 is the year of change and transformation in Dubai and all around the UAE, especially how the digital and online solutions got integrated within our daily lives, it have completely changed the expectations and behavior of the customers. Earlier people were not so adoptive towards the high-tech solutions, rather prefer more traditional approaches and methodologies. Now a days, everyone is familiar with the usefulness and convenience of the digital solutions. The marketers and the administrations are also embracing digital and high-tech solutions knowing that it could provide a great competitive edge in customer journey transformation and customer happiness. The COVID situation and the past experience in 2020 have given the rise to the contactless payment, self-service and social distancing. Especially the banks and other customer service sectors are already trying to keep up with this new trend. Apart from the contactless payment, the entire branch experience and customer’s expectations are driving the innovation and technological solutions to the next level.
Earlier businesses were afraid that the very advanced digital solutions might not gain popularity among the general consumers, however in 2021 the digital branch transformation have reached to a new level. The customer experience, customer behavior and operational efficiency are the most influential factors on the digital transformation. The businesses are seeking methods and ways to preserve precious customers and improve customer retention while also trying to reduce expenses to ensure higher profitability and revenue generation. Here are some of the 2021 trends for digital branch transformation in Dubai, UAE:
Digitalization and Automation of Customer Experience
As the 2020 situation was totally unprecedented, which suddenly halted a lot of business operations. However, the banking sector and the customer service industry was quicker to adopt to the digital solutions to aid the social distancing and closure of the branches. The smartphone applications and the digital service through online gain popularity. Customer feel more comfortable using the digital platforms to avail a service. After that, now when the businesses have resumed all over the world, here in Dubai and all other emirates of UAE the customer behavior have completely changed, the customer experience and customer journey are setting up new trends. Business have to change their practices, processes and methods at a very higher pace in order to meet the demand and expectations of the customers. It doesn’t mean that all older queue management systems and other customer satisfactions solutions have become irrelevant or useless. But the point is that the customers are expecting and hoping to see a digital and automated kind of business processes and customer journey.
Minimizing the Gap between Customer’s Expectation and Your Capabilities
Since the customer’s expectation and market trends have been changed, the business need to focus on smart solutions and methods which can reduce the gap between the customer’s expectations and your capabilities. It is crucial to keep this gap at the lowest, else the customer will switch to another brand. The UAE is a very large market with too many businesses are operating and more are joining the market on the daily bases which raise the level of competition. Customers have too many options, and due to the impact of the pandemic and the new methods and processes to handle that impact the customers are already concerned, and it is an estimation that 8 out of 10 customers are willing to switch if their current service provider failed to meet their expectations and needs. Here are some of the well-renowned gaps between customer’s expectations and a business’s operational capabilities:
- Cultural Gap: This gap is common when the top level management is not customer centric, the organizational culture and tradition flows from top to bottom. In such scenarios the staff won’t be able to satisfy the customers.
- Value Gap: The gap between the actual quality and features of products and services and the expectations and needs of the customers is known as value gap. This gap is very common where the communication is not so strong and business is not getting customer feedbacks.
- Emotional Gap: When the communication gap is too much or the marketing and communication efforts are not in the right direction the, feedback is not taken the customer complaints are not solved the customers feel emotionally distant from the brand and think the business doesn’t care about them much.
- Marketing Gap: When a business markets and advertise its products and service with overpromising content and the actual products and services doesn’t meet the expectation the customers, the customer feel disappointment and eventually switch to the other brands.
These are just a few example, there are so many other things that can cause your customers to switch. The important thing is to understand what your customers think about your business, what their needs are and what their expectations are, then make plans and strategies to improve everything for your customers. It is important to understand your capabilities and limitations too, for example, if you want to compete and you must have to keep the cost to a certain level then the strategy should have to be made in a way that your products and services can offer at least the most anticipated features. This way any such gap can be reduced to improve the trust and brand impression. This will significantly improve the overall efficiency and operational capabilities of the branch.
Going Contactless and Rise of Virtual Queuing
Not only in Dubai, UAE but all over the world business have witnessed that the branches who are offering contactless and virtual queuing are attracting more customers than the regular branches. The customer behavior, market trends and the customer’s expectations have completely transformed the business practices, methodologies and in some cases the entire customer journey has completely changed. Going contactless, digitalization and automation have become the new norm. All sorts and types of businesses are preferring contactless operations, the eCommerce are emphasizing on contactless deliveries and the business are offering methods of contactless payments and all that. The QR Codes and digital interfaces are taking over the usual paperwork and much more. It is extremely crucial that a business tries to offer as many contactless services or service steps and processes as much possible. At least what touch points can be converted to contactless should be converted to contactless. Businesses should seriously think about offering less than least personal contact inside their branch.
Virtual queuing is an excellent technique to control the number of customers inside the branch. It help preventing crowd formation. The virtual queuing is also very helpful in implementing social distancing policies. The virtual queuing also enables the customers to sign-up remotely for the queue and then wait in virtual lines, without being physically present in the actual line inside the branch. The customers can sign-up from SMS, Calls, Email, Smartphone Apps, Online Portals, QR Codes and much more. This gives them a sense of trust and confidence. In addition the virtual queuing also prevent long wait time, in fact the customers can directly arrive at the counter when their ticket is called without any wait. Waiting is the most negative factor in customer experience. Less wait and quicker service delivery make customers happy and satisfied. Moreover the virtual queuing also have other benefits such as it empowers the staff and reduce their work load. It automates various process and enables a single agent/server to serve more customers in a single shift. This improve the operational capabilities and increase profitability of the entire branch.
Rise of Self-Service and Interactive Kiosks
Another excellent technique used by many businesses in Dubai and all across the UAE is offering self-service solutions and interactive kiosks. The self-service means that a customer is being provided with an automated digital system/interface which allow them to avail the service all by themselves and there is no need of any staff assistant throughout the process. The customers can reach at the self-service stations or portals and avail the service by themselves without any wait time. It enables instant service delivery with 24/7 availability. Each branch these days should have a dedicated section for the self-service customers which will not only improve the customer experience but it will also be very helpful for the staff and it will reduce their workload. Obviously not everyone is familiar or I would rather say ‘comfortable’ in operating at self-service interactive kiosk, so the regular counters will be there to serve them, this also help businesses to reduce the people in the waiting area and to implement the social distancing and other policies easily.
There are so many different types of the interactive self-service kiosks which are being used to offer a variety of services. We are using self-service kiosks since a long time and almost everyone living in Dubai or anywhere in UAE must have used one once or at least say them. For example the vending machine is a self-service kiosk, the ATM is a self-service cash counter and other such services which everyone uses on daily bases. These self-service interactive kiosks comes with a variety of hardware and software features and functionalities. Some interactive kiosks also allow customers and visitors to do the registration process from a medium size touch screen interface. Earlier the physical keyboard and track pad were used but now a days on-screen keyboard and touch panels are popular. Moreover the Emirates ID, Printer, Scanners, Passport Scanner, IRIS, Biometrics, Cash Deposit, RFID Scanner, QR Code reader, etc. and many more such devices can be integrated with the self-service interactive kiosks. All these technologies are very helpful and enables the businesses to innovate new and unique solutions for their customers.
Technologically Advanced Queue Management System
A queue management system manages customer flow and is majorly responsible for the customer journey and customer experience in any branch. The queue management system is very important. As different businesses have different needs and different internal business processes and mechanisms so a queue management system must have to be efficient enough to improve all customer experiences throughout the entire customer journey. We always recommend a tailor-made solution that can efficiently boost overall productivity and profitability of the business. A queue management can have a variety of software and hardware components however we will discuss some key points that every business should consider while choosing a queuing solution for them. The very important factor that you need to consider is the type of your services. Whether a service can be delivered through a single counter or is your services or some of your services are stepped services that require your customers to get served through multiple counters for a single service deliver. These things will define the type of the queue management system.
Moreover other factors such as how many counter do you have or your policies such as priority customers, dedicated customers and such other details should be considered. The digital signage are an essential component of a queue management system however the size of the display screen and the placement should be decided strategically that at least one screen is visible from anywhere in the waiting room so that the customers don’t have to get up from their seats or get discomfort to get the view of the screen. The announcement system and the queuing information should be multi-lingual, at least Arabic and English is must to have. Then the counter plates and other signs should be included in the system as per the requirements. It is better to have remote management, virtual queuing and customer feedback modules in the queue management system. The centralized information center is must to have so the head office can manage and monitor all the connected branches. The queue management system should be able to offer flexible and easy sign-up methods such as interactive self-service kiosks, remote sign-up, virtual queuing and smartphone compatibility. Last but not least, a better queue management system should be able to collect and capture data from various touch points of the customer interaction to compile business intelligence data which can later be useful for decision making and policy making.
Collect Customer Feedback and Business Intelligence
Business in Dubai and all around the UAE in fact all around the world often overlooked the importance of customer feedback and business intelligence. However, these two are essential for evaluation and improvements. Business often spend huge amounts in customer satisfaction solutions, products/services, operational improvements, infrastructure and other solutions but how a business will know if their all efforts and investments are going in the right direction? The customer feedback and business intelligence is the only way to know that. A customer feedback is direct measurement of the customer happiness and customer satisfaction. The customer satisfaction is considered to be the direct measurement of the overall progress and development of a business. That is why collecting customer feedback and gathering business intelligence data from various touch points and KPIs (key performance indicators)are crucial to understand the impact and effectiveness of all your efforts and investments.
Moreover collecting customer feedback, gathering data and getting the indicators can’t be beneficial unless actionable reports are compiled from this data. The reports are based on the in-built system analytical engine and statistical processing, which is mandatory to have. It is extremely important that the reports and data collected from various systems and KPIs is completely in-line with the internal evaluation processes. The data has to be compiled in various reporting formats. The corporate reports should be produced for the higher management to let them take decisions and upgrade their policies. The detailed and summary reports should be produced to pinpoint the areas of improvements. The KPIs and employee performance indicators should be collected to assess the employees. The business should have to think critically when planning the reporting and business intelligence modules. That is why we always recommend customized queue management systems which are dedicatedly designed for the very specific needs of the business and are tend to be more efficient.
Conclusion
The year 2020 have completely changed the entire business landscape in the entire world. Business have recovered fairly quickly and are very eager to keep a hold on their existing customers and also attracting more customers to ensure a steady growth. In the new landscape the marketer are focusing more in communication and better customer experience. The customer journey transformation is absolutely necessary. The business will have to abide by the government policies, the regulation and social distancing laws and the safety and health of their customers and the staff is also top priority. Which is why business are seeking new methods and techniques for branch transformation. As suddenly we all went online and everyone has to interact with the digital services and business and organizations also have to switch to the digital platforms, the acceptance level of the digital and automation got very high among the general consumers. In fact people now expect some kind of digital and technology-backed interaction with their favorite brands and businesses.
The customer experience is extremely important, if your customers are satisfied they will be more loyal and if they are unhappy they will immediately switch without any second thought. The competition in the market is very high, the customers have too many options. But we also understand each business have their own limits, capabilities and a finite stream of precious resources. So we always recommend our customers and readers to think critically and try to minimize the gap between the customer’s expectations and your operational capabilities. The virtual queuing is another great tool to deal with today’s scenarios. It is absolutely necessary that you implement a queuing solution which resonate with your internal organizational structure and add value to both the customer experience and to the management and operational efficiency. The self-service counters and terminals are also a great strategy to boost customer experience. In order to evaluate all those efforts and investments and the overall efficiency and productivity of the branch the customer feedback collection and business intelligence is a mandatory feature for any branch transformation tool. Businesses are reporting huge gains from the policies and strategies made on the bases of business intelligence data. RSI Concepts is a leading name in Dubai, UAE in branch transformation solutions, queue management systems, customer feedback systems and other customer journey transformation tools, if you need any help feel free to reach us out through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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