Many companies that deal directly with customers have communication strategies in place for ensuring that their customer interactions and engagements leave nothing to be desired. Despite all these efforts and game plans on how to effectively manage customer communications, companies often find themselves on the receiving end of online complaints through reviews and negative tweets posted about their poor customer service – whether justified or not.
With the rise of many social media channels and apps that companies are now using to communicate with their customers, they need to be aware of the most effective mediums so they can maximize the potential for successful outcomes when they communicate with their customers either through inquiries or offering support services. We have put together some of the best practices on improving customer communications below.
1. Proactive Communications
The benefits of proactive customer communications are innumerable, but the main ones are that it helps reduce customer inquiries and provides transparency to the customers on the service they are receiving from a business. You can only imagine the level of inquiries that a company the size of Amazon would be receiving if customers did not have the level of transparency that they have become used to when ordering from their website.
2. Strategic Follow-ups
Following up with your customers shows that you care about how they feel using your product or service and allows you to develop a bond with them which may consequently increase their customer lifetime value to your business. However, not all follow-ups are the same; constant emails that do not generate value need to be avoided. Focus your follow-up efforts on either informing them about a solution you made to an issue they faced or inform them of a new feature that they had been waiting on as this type of follow-up elicits a positive reaction from customers.
3. Automated Solutions
The world is more interconnected than ever and the days of having your customers wait through the weekend until the next business day are slowly starting to drift behind us. Take advantage of automated customer solutions such as developing Knowledge Base articles that provide documentation and suggest articles based on pre-defined keywords or implementing AI chat features that provide responses based on the commonly requested items in the form of a chat window.
4. Gather and Act on Customer Feedback
The long-term success of companies largely depends on how they gather customer feedback and what they do with the data that they acquire in this fashion. Companies can arrange focus groups, collect data metrics, and send out surveys on products purchased and services rendered so they can assess their efficacy as viewed by their own customers. A lot can be learned from such feedback and top companies habitually adapt quickly and pivot their business operations or service offerings to take advantage of the new insights they obtained.
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