When you think about the most important elements required to make a business successful, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? While there are many important aspects that allow a business to grow and thrive, there is one thing no business would be able to survive without, and that is its customers.
To ensure you have loyal customers who always come back for more, you need to ensure your communication is as close to perfect as it could be. If you’re looking for strategies that will allow you to improve communication with your customers, you’ve come to the right place.
Take customer support to the next level
While there are multiple ways your customers communicate with your business, the most common method they use to get in touch is your customer support portals. This is why your customer service team is one of the most important teams in your entire organization.
As much as 81% of consumers say a positive customer service experience increases the chances of them making another purchase. If you want to have a happy customer base that is happy to make repeat purchases, you need to take your customer support to the next level.
Here are some ideas on how to go about it:
- Ensure your team is easily accessible. Avoid any customer frustrations by ensuring they can reach your team with very little effort and through as many touch points as possible. This also means your responses need to be quick and provided in a timely manner.
- Make efficiency your top priority. Try to create a support process that will help your agents focus on the most critical requests first and the small issues later. Some customers will need your support team more than others, and if you give them the advantage, your support will be more efficient.
- Keep your staff happy. If you learn how to take care of your employees, you will have a team of loyal and hardworking customer support agents who are willing to go above and beyond for your business. This means they will take good care of every customer that contacts your company.
Finally, you need to think about optimizing your support through tools. If you implement a help center software, you’ll have a plethora of features designed to make customer support better and more efficient.
Don’t ignore social listening
By now, almost every business knows the importance of a social media presence. But we’re not here to talk about social media marketing. Instead, we want to focus on social listening.
Social listening is the practice of monitoring conversations your customers and followers are having across various social media platforms. Once you’ve gathered enough data from social listening, you can use that information to make business decisions.
Social listening is important because it allows you to identify customer issues, understand what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong, define trends in your industry, and much more. Overall, it allows you to get a sense of what customers really think about your business and brand.
For example, let’s say that you’re running a campaign on Instagram, which is currently one of the most popular social media platforms. Through social listening, you can see what your Instagram followers say about your brand and find ways to improve it.
Allow for omnichannel support
Do you know all the channels customers use to reach your business? If you think that it’s enough to only have a few channels for customer communication in this modern world where communication is more efficient and faster than ever, you’re mistaken.
Modern customers want and expect their favorite brands to offer omnichannel support. Apart from the usual phone number and email address, you need to offer other communication channels as well. This includes live chat, social media messaging, and chatbots, just to name a few.
Ideally, you should be able to provide your customers with 24/7 support. If you don’t, they will switch over to one of your competitors that does.
Understand the importance of self-service
As we already mentioned, some customers will have a bigger reason to contact your support team than others. But in certain companies, customers don’t have any other way to find out the information they need. This happens because these companies don’t give customers the option of self-service.
Self-service has exploded in popularity over the past few years because most customers would much rather find the information they need by themselves. This is why all successful companies have FAQ pages, video tutorials, knowledge bases, and how-to guides.
Allowing your customers to find answers to the questions they have by themselves will be beneficial for both them and your service team. This isn’t a luxury anymore, it’s become a necessity, seeing as how 88% of customers expect companies to offer an online self-service portal.
Final thoughts
Not too long ago, businesses didn’t understand the importance of keeping customers happy and satisfied, but that has changed. Nowadays, for a business to be truly successful, it needs to make its customers a top priority and give them what they want.
What modern customers want is to be able to communicate with a business how they want, when they want, and be treated with respect and understanding when they get in touch with it.
