High Touch Guidance, Low Touch Effort
No one likes to feel like they’re talking to a robot. The battle of providing high-touch vs. tech touch are commonly pitted against each other when scaling or attempting to create more efficiency. High-touch assistance can be just as valuable as capital when working with a client. Providing quality guidance at scale is a challenge, especially when its being conducted solely through email and floating checklists.
Let’s look at the difference between High-touch vs. Tech touch:
High-touch – Helping customers on a human level through various stages. It involves a much higher participation, and usually relies on one individual or team within the company to maintain direct, personal, and frequent contact with accounts.
Tech touch – There’s very little human interaction with the customer, but check-ins are frequent and managed by digital lending software. This data driven kind of proactive management can help customers feel valued and ensures they know where to go to solve their problems, should any arise.
Using a Blended Approach
The key to working with more applicants at once is personalized, but automated guidance for every client. Full automation will make a client feel alienated. Providing guidance upfront drives towards more strategic conversations with customers rather than more rudimentary explanations about requirements.
A client can guide themselves through a process if they know a few key things: what they need to provide, why they need to provide it, and how they can provide it. Providing the same information to every client through a blended approach can be both efficiently and personably done.
We encourage our clients to incorporate these questions into their application checklist item information blocks:
Other ways to provide high touch guidance through a blended approach can be the use of automated messages that are pre-set but use the tone, language, and customer service style of your organization. Automated feedback, when paired with the option to dive deeper with a real person, keeps the applicant happy and tedious tasks off your to-do list.
There are recurring communications that can be automated with relevant information in every program’s process. Moving forward in 2021, maximizing the impact of funding is easier by ensuring funds are used in an efficient manner. Perhaps more importantly, when time is used efficiently it means that your staff is less prone to burn out, your funders will see results quicker, and more dollars will be spent funding on projects than on tedious, time consuming tasks.