In today’s business world, a good relationship with customers is critical. After all, the customer is the blood of any business. Without them, your business won’t be able to survive in this competitive world.
Building a good relationship starts with regular communication with your clients. Communication is an essential key to increase customer satisfaction, expand your customer base, and your business’ overall success.
To help you out, here’s how better communication can increase your customer base:
- Establish Trust
When you have regular interaction and communication with your client, the stronger their trust will be in you.
As humans, we love forming bonds and being able to trust others. With that said, it can be a bit different in the world of business. Sometimes, customers worry that they’re being taken advantage of for a sale. Businesses want to prove the opposite.
This issue can be resolved with effective communication. Attentively listening and reaching out to your customers can prove your commitment beyond just closing a sale. This can build satisfaction and trust in your brand, which also means attracting new customers to try your services and products.
- Transform Customers to Brand Advocates
Staying in touch with your customer has a strong psychological impact. For one, it shows that you care and can give your customer a sense of importance and belonging.
When customers are happy, they’re more likely to spread that goodness to family, friends, colleagues, and just about anyone in their circle. Just think about it. If you’ve got an amazing experience with a certain brand, you’re probably going to rave all about it to your family or friends later on.
Thus, your customer can be your cheapest and best form of word-of-mouth marketing, as long as you give them a reason to be one.
- Encourage Loyalty
Proactive communication is an excellent tool to encourage loyalty and making customers stay. By communicating proactively, you show your commitment to providing high satisfaction. Not only that, but you can also help differentiate your company from competitors. As mentioned, this builds trust, which, in turn, creates loyalty.
Customers trust real-life humans communicating with them on a regular basis more than the values and ideals of a brand. Thus, with regular interactions from your brand, your customers can build a life-long relationship with your business.
- Innovating and Improving Services and Products
Good communication works both ways. When customers are given the chance to express their views and experience of your services and products, you might stumble to new sources of innovations and improvements. This feedback can reveal some common feelings among your customers, implying that there’s a need for some modifications. In addition, good communication with your customer allows you to develop services that are tailored to their specific requirements and needs.
When customers see that you’re acting on their suggestions and needs, they’ll feel valued and more likely to shop again at your store. In addition to this, they may also share their experience with their friends and family, allowing you to build a rapport with your customer base. Customer reviews can also help put your business out to potential clients, helping your company grow. This builds awareness and trust, allowing you to cross-sell and upsell additional products with less friction.
- Enhance Brand Reputation
Having a good reputation for outstanding customer service can enhance your brand image and help you stand out.
Effective communication with your customers can also help identify any pain points that your customer may have as well as resolving conflicts, preventing them from becoming serious issues that can damage your brand’s reputation.
Asking questions and making your brand reachable can help resolve bad experiences. With effective communication, you can better understand your customer’s issues, offering the right solution, and establishing satisfaction, which can serve as good PR.
When others learn of how you handle mistakes and bad experiences, potential customers are more inclined to work with you. This can boost awareness and prompting new leads to search for you. As a result, your brand will be on top of people’s minds when they consider products and services in your niche.
3 Tips to Improve Customer Communication
Now that you know how effective communication can help the bottom line of your business, it’s time to implement some strategies to improve your customer service.
- Employ the Right Tools
In today’s modern age, people are now more tech-oriented. This means that your customers are more likely to reach out using multiple channels.
With that said, a proper set of Call Center Dialer can help your customer service team to be more efficient and productive when communicating with your customers. Here are some tools and technological advancements that can help you out:
- Ringless Voicemails: To regularly reach out to your customer, try employing a ringless voicemail. Basically, it’s an audio message directly sent to voicemail inboxes without ringing. You can pre-record messages and use software to directly drop them into a customer’s voicemail boxes. This is a direct marketing strategy that you can use to increase your reach while keeping the outreach cost low.
You can use this to welcome new customers, updating virtual attendees, reconnecting with customers, rewarding clients with promotional offers, and the like.
- Live Engagement Tools: First off, you need to implement live engagement tools for real-time assistance. You can identify the error in the first touchpoint and provide a solution right away. This can help reduce the number of interactions, saving time and frustration for both your customers and employees.
Live chats, co-browsing, and video chats are some prime examples.
- Emails: Emails are the third most popular communication channel for consumers. This is beneficial to customers since they don’t have to wait in line for a query. They can just send an email whenever they want. It also allows your customer support representatives to stagger requests in order to deal with each query to a high standard.
- Chatbots: Chatbots can automate your customer communication. Chatbots offer always-on and fast support, allowing you to engage with your customers 24/7, which is useful especially when your customer service team isn’t available. These bots can engage your customers to provide immediate answers to basic queries, boosting customer satisfaction.
Take note, however, that chatbots shouldn’t be your premier communication tool. You can use chatbots for the first contact channel, and then transfer the more complex conversations for human support.
- Social Media: Traditionally, social media is used for brand awareness. However, it also proves to be an excellent platform for communicating and resolving queries and issues from customers. Thus, you need to pay special attention to your social media accounts, such as Twitter and Facebook, to build a relationship with your customers.
- Follow Communication Etiquette
In general, customers switch brands because they’re offended by rude or untrained support agents. According to a report, 70% of a customer’s journey is dictated by how they’re treated. So, to ensure that your customers have high satisfaction, here are some tips on communication etiquette:
- Personal Touch: Customers want to have an effective conversation with real humans with real feelings who are ready to cater to their needs. This fosters an atmosphere of respect and value in customer communications.
Also, it doesn’t hurt to add some personal touch when communicating with your client. You can both be friendly and professional at the same time. Address your customers with their first name, ask how they’re doing, make some humorous joke when appropriate, all of these can help make communication closer and effective.
- Active Listening: This means having the full concentration and focus to understand what your customer has to say without asking questions in between or interrupting them as they talk. By listening closely to your customer, you can figure out exactly what your customer wants, their problems, opinions, and feedback. This way, you can better resolve any issues effectively, enhancing customer satisfaction.
- Be Empathetic: Customers want you to understand them. So, you need to try and put yourself in their shoes, which helps you understand their pain points and perspective, allowing you to communicate accordingly with them.
- Use Positive Words: When communicating with your customers, make sure that you use positive words in your conversation. Use phrases and words such as certainly, definitely, why not, absolutely sounds positive, friendly, and personal.
- Avoiding Jargons: Never use complex terms that are difficult to understand and can cause confusion with your customer. Instead, try using easy and simple terms in order to have effective communication with your customer.
In case you’re using technical terms, make sure that you explain it accordingly to your customer.
- Measure Customer Communication Metrics
Measuring your customer communication metrics can be overwhelming, however, it’s vital in understanding the impact of your customer service and how effective your communication methods are.
With that said, here are the key communication metrics that you should be measuring on a regular basis.
- Customer Satisfaction: Determine the satisfaction level of a customer after a conversation with an agent.
- Average Resolution Time: The time it takes for a query or issues to be resolved.
- First Response Time: The time it takes for an agent to respond to a customer’s query.
By measuring these metrics, you can identify any gaps in the performance of your customer service representatives and where they can be improved. It also helps identify common issues or topics within your customer base, allowing you to proactively communicate with customers and making changes or improvements to your services and products.
Conclusion
Communication is at the heart of human relationships, and it can make or break an organization. Being able to effectively communicate with your customers, you can expect repeat business, increased sales, and an ever-expanding customer base.
In contrast, unable to establish good communication means frustrated customers, negative word-of-mouth, tarnished reputation, and decreased sales. So, stop doubting the benefits of good communication with your customer and start thinking of how you can improve your customer services.
