Customer communication is an essential component of any business’s success. From attracting new clients to establishing long-term relations with the existing ones, all these activities depend on the quality of interactions between the company’s representatives (sales, assistant, support) and clients.
So how can this high-quality customer communication be achieved? Generally, by being proactive in communication, employing an omnichannel approach, replying quickly and with personalized replies, and adopting team standards. Let’s explore every mentioned aspect in more detail.
Keep response time short
In a world of highly saturated market niches and fierce competition, clients are unlikely to wait for brands to reply. Likely, there are plenty of companies providing alternative products or solutions, and if their sales departments are more on the ball — say ‘farewell’ to your client.
An accepted response time varies from industry to industry, but, on average, an email should be replied to within a day, and anything more than 1–2 minutes is considered too much for waiting on the phone, in messengers, or in live chat.
Be Proactive
This good old piece of life advice is relevant for the customer experience industry more than ever. Today customers’ attention is being constantly pulled in various directions and the sheer amount of visual and textual content is amazing.
How does a brand stand out in such a situation? By reaching out to them first. This is possible not only with email promotions or by responding to social media mentions but even with free live chat software, such as Umnico Live Chat, that allows users to see what particular page a website visitor browses and text them first, starting a conversation and providing solutions before the customer asks for them.
See Also: Five Tips for Good Customer Loyalty
Make it personal
Personalization goes hand in hand with ‘write the first advice’ because it is what provides a customer with a sense of being important and valuable to a company.
Personalizing customer interactions helps to build long-term relationships with customers and ensure their loyalty in the future. This can be done by addressing clients by name, communicating via their preferred channels, and providing personalized solutions to customer issues.
Go Omnichannel
The omnichannel approach refers to maintaining an active presence and interacting with customers across multiple channels, including social media, instant messengers, email, website, and so on. This allows a company to appeal to a wider audience and engage every client in their preferred way.
The key difficulty here is establishing an efficient workflow for employees: switching between multiple messengers and tying up separate conversations (if a customer decides to resume a Facebook conversation in WhatsApp, for example) can be messy.
Here, an omnichannel messaging platform, such as Umnico, can link all of the company’s communication channels to a single convenient and secure interface, providing a unified view of all dialogues and analytics.
Adopt standards
To ensure consistent customer communication, a company should establish team standards, based on business goals and a particular function of every team.
This means setting key performance indicators for support and sales, such as responding to customer messages within a certain amount of time, customer satisfaction rating, issue resolution time, and so on.
Adopting such standards can help to ensure that customer communication is consistent and of high quality across all departments.
Read Also: Customer Loyalty Metrics for Business Growth
Focus on the first impression
The first interaction with a customer is the most important one. Over 80% of people interviewed by Interactions said that a bad experience with phone support is a deal breaker for any future business with a company. First interactions are the greatest chance to make a good and lasting impression.
Here, categorizing new clients and tagging them in customer support systems helps to give that little bit of extra attention that goes a long way.
Overall, customer communication is essential for any business, and proper customer communication can be achieved by taking a proactive approach, using an omnichannel messaging system, responding to customers quickly, personalizing customer interactions, and adopting team standards.
