Effective communication is essential for a seamless customer experience. You communicate with your customers verbally or in writing at all touch points. The customer’s interaction with the brand takes place at these communication points and directly affects the customer experience.
In order for people to feel heard, supported and accepted, the communication strategy needs to be designed correctly. Today, it is critical for businesses that customer-facing employees are comfortable communicating both digitally and face-to-face. Employees can interact with customers via email, phone, live chat and face-to-face meetings. With a common and effective communication strategy across all channels, it will be possible to create the perfect customer experience. With the right and effective communication, you can turn your customers into brand ambassadors.
Let’s take a look at 6 key factors you should pay attention to when communicating with your customers.
1- Listen anytime and anywhere
Your customers have a lot of information that can help you improve your products and services. Sometimes this information can be so important that it can illuminate the blind spots of your business. In order for this information to flow from your customers to you, you must be actively listening. Remember the proverb that speech is silver, but silence is gold and always make sure that your customer is doing more talking than you are. Answer any questions your customers have and always let them have the last word.
Offer channels to listen more than just transactional and periodic feedback. Even a feedback form on your website or an email address can become valuable channels for listening to your customers.
Social media is also a channel where you should listen regularly. Apart from popular social media sites, follow comments about your business on forums and sectoral portals. Be sure to respond to questions and requests from these channels.
When measuring customer experience, do not neglect to collect open-ended responses other than metrics. Happy customers may also have something they would like to share with you, so provide customers with optional options to send their comments as standard.
2- Create personalised communication
Knowing who your customers are and having information about their past experiences will directly affect the success of your communication. Many studies show that customers tend to prefer brands that know them. Always address your customers by name, including in campaign messages.
It does not matter whether you have a B2C or B2B business model. Always communicate in H2H (Human to human). If you communicate with empathy, your customers will connect with you on a human level and value your business.
For personalised communication, you will need a CRM or customer loyalty system. You can be sure that you will get a return on your technology investment for this. By integrating your CRM system with your CX software, you can see all your customer’s information, requests and feedback at a glance.
3- Be fast
It is a fact that life has accelerated with the developing technology. Distances have shortened, communication has become easier. Although this change seems to have saved us time, time has become much more valuable. Waiting more than a minute to connect to a customer representative at the call centre is considered a bad experience. The situation is no different for businesses that find call centre costs high and move communication completely to digital media. Customers want to communicate quickly across all channels. You can increase your communication speed with chatbot and live chat. Create procedures for answering and resolving customer requests and set deadlines for return. Make sure to define KPI and OKR definitions for compliance with these deadlines.
4- Establish omni-channel communication
Traditional communication channels such as mail, telephone and face-to-face communication have now been joined by digital channels. Although the dynamics of each channel are different, customers communicate through the channel they deem most appropriate at the time. A communication that starts on a website may continue on a mobile application. Information about a request made by e-mail can be requested from the call centre. Creating an omni-channel structure that allows you to manage all channels from one place will strengthen your communication with your customers.
Keep in mind that generations X, Y and Z may have different communication preferences. Determine the appropriate channels for the customer segment and be sure to ask your customers about their communication preferences.
5- Pay attention to privacy and security
Personal data protection is among the hottest topics in customer communication. Laws such as KVKK in our country and GDPR in European Union countries put customers’ personal data under legal protection. Make sure that your customers’ data is protected in accordance with the law. Show transparently and clearly what information you store and for what purpose you use it.
Protect your customer data against cyber attacks and leaks.
When communicating with customers, give them control over the type of information they want to share with you. This way, let them decide whether they prefer an email, phone call or a different channel, and allow them to change their preferences at any time.
6- Measure
One of the golden rules in business life, “You cannot manage without measuring!” also valid for communication. Every communication should be measured. Offer customer experience measurement metrics such as NPS and Likert to your customers who receive service from all communication points such as call centre, live chat, chatbot, web, e-mail, etc. to evaluate the communication. Regularly track communication comparatively on a channel and employee basis.
