Moving customers to digital channels for account management is a win for your organization. 

It reduces cost-to-service or cost-to-collect and it lowers the number of staff you need (which is no joke in this era of record-low unemployment).

But it's equally great for your customers. They don't have to wait until your customer support team is available. They don't have to loop through endless chatbots trying to get a person.

And most importantly, they don't have to suffer through the Zeigarnik Effect.

What is the Zeigarnik Effect?

The Zeigarnik Effect is actually a pretty simple psychological observation. It simply means that your brain recalls unfinished tasks more easily than unfinished ones.

"[Bluma] Zeigarnik studied this recall phenomenon after her professor, Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, noticed that a waiter remembered the details of still-unpaid orders better than those orders that had already paid," explains Psychology Today.

That makes sense, right? You keep a grocery list in your head until you've gone to the store or placed the order, and then you forget it. You don't need it anymore.

But until you go to the grocery store? There's an endless jingle playing in your head, right? Milk, bread, apples, Fritos. Milk, bread, apples, Fritos.

That's annoying and it interferes with your ability to get other things done.

Digital channels as an across-the-board win

When we sponsored a panel at the Future Summit, a big part of the conversation was how important having a full-service account portal is - not just for payments, but for whatever the customer needs.

Again, that benefits your team, but the impact on the customer is huge.

There's a lot of talk about "delighting" customers, but in reality? It doesn't take much. 

Think about the last time you needed to contact a business and were able to take care of things online in your own time. How did you feel? Delighted, right? Maybe with a little dose of relief on top of that? And then the next time you needed something, you got to re-experience those feelings when you realized you could do it yourself.

If your customers remember they want to make a payment or change their due date or update their mailing address or anything else at 10:00 pm on a Tuesday, they can hop onto your account portal and make it happen. No waiting. No endless mental interruptions as their brain sings to them about Fritos and oil changes.

So when you think about driving channel migration, think about how you can rescue your customers from the Zeigarnik Effect by filling your portal with the ability to do as much as they can on their own.

Need a little help figuring out what they want? Learn more about how turning your unstructured conversations into structured data can reveal what your customers complain about, care about, and need so you can solve their problem before they even know they have one.

Now that's delightful.