Let’s start by asking something very simple:
Your customers have high expectations. And if your business cannot satisfy them, they will leave you for your competition.
If this seems harsh or wrong to you, feel free to lie to yourself, for the others let’s move on.
In addition to consuming a product or service that works and that they like, customers want their experience to be complete. That is to say, they expect companies to know how to contact them when they need help or advice, they want to feel “unique”, to be customers ” privileged “, they want a team which surpasses itself for them and which makes them proud to have” consumed “with you, to have adhered to your mission and your corporate culture.
You probably already know that the customer experience doesn’t end once a customer has purchased your product or used your service once. It is a continuous work that the structures must constantly seek to improve and optimize in order to best satisfy its customers. Through this new post, we will present some tips on how you can ensure that each customer interaction is “unique” and that they have an incredible experience by consuming with you and not your competitors!
Customer interaction according to each channel (Marketing, Sales, support, etc.)
Customer interactions are times when people communicate and engage with businesses, with their members. These moments occur throughout the customer journey and are typically tied to marketing campaigns, sales promotions, and service issues.
There are plenty of reasons customers interact with businesses, not to mention the plethora of channels they use as well. In fact, there is a “journey” that we usually find during the buying journey of a customer, this concept is called the “ Buyer Journey “:
– Awareness : At this stage your prospect realizes that he has a need to satisfy, a problem to solve, but he does not yet know how.
– Consideration : The potential buyer did some research that led them to consider different possible solutions to their problem. He will study the tracks and make a choice according to his opinion, feelings and criteria. During this phase, the buyer compares your solution with that of your competitors, or only your competitors among themselves.
– Acquisition (The decision phase) : As the name suggests, this is the crucial step of this “journey”, the potential buyer has identified the solutions, has done his research and is ready to choose the solution he deems best for him.
Let’s take the perspective that this buyer chose to consume your solution during the decision phase, well done you have a new customer and the “Buyer Journey” phase is over and believe us it is the most complicated! Because as you know, it’s easier to sell a product or service to someone or a business that has already bought from you than it is to convert new prospects into customers, right?
Therefore, let’s go further in our explanation of the “Buyer Journey”, add two steps to it:
– Experience : The customer bought your solution, depending on your activity, for example in the case of a B2B platform or a mobile application. This phase represents the Onboarding of your customers at the start when they start using your solution.
– Loyalty : Your customer is satisfied with his purchase, onboarding, customer support in case of question, he receives personalized messages, emails, etc … All the attention that makes his experience “privileged” will make him more and more loyal . In addition, a satisfied customer is your best salesperson, no doubt that they will promote your solution to their friends, family or colleague.
Overall, there are three main reasons why customers interact with a business: marketing, sales and customer service . In each of these areas, customers have different needs, goals, and expectations of your brand, but that doesn’t make one reason more important than another. All of these sectors are important opportunities for your brand to acquire, convert and retain your customers .
Let’s look at a few examples of customer interactions, categorized by marketing, sales, and customer service.
Interactions with customers in marketing
- A customer sees a post for your brand on social media and comments on it.
- A customer comes to your store and asks about the characteristics of a specific product or service.
- A customer signs up for your newsletter to receive weekly updates and promotions.
Interactions with customers in the area of sales
- A customer surfs to your website and decides to open a live conversation with a salesperson to learn more about your offering.
- A customer receives an email from your sales team and sets up an appointment. (Prospecting)
- A salesperson calls a customer to find out if they like their new product or service.
- A sales person sends an email to a customer to follow up on a previous conversation.
Interactions with customers in customer service
- A customer calls a hotline for help with a product or service.
- A customer has a question about a product, service, or marketing promotion and comes to you through social media or your instant chat.
- A customer who is unhappy with their customer experience writes a negative review of your brand on review sites like Trustpilot.
- A customer success contacts a customer who shows signs of disinterest. (Churn potential)
Before continuing, it’s important to note the channels that customers can use to interact with your business. If new channels seem to be created every day, here are some of the most popular: Email, Chat, social networks, landing page , telephone…
Now let’s see how you can make every customer interaction memorable with these practical tips.
How do you make every customer interaction the best it can be?
1. Show empathy and gratitude.
Do you know this proverb? “Treat others as you want to be treated.”
The golden rule of customer service should be “ Treat customers the way you want to be treated as a customer. ” You do not think ?
It might sound simple, but making sure that each of your customer interactions shows your concern and empathy for your customers’ struggles and your gratitude for their loyalty is essential. Here are some ways to achieve this:
- Thank your customers for everything : Thank them for their patience if your business experiences an outage or service disruption. Thank them for understanding if you or your business makes a mistake. Thank them for their loyalty when they renew or buy again. Thank them for taking the time to share their comments, whether good or bad, because you know your customers’ feedback is the best way to improve your product and the way you work in general.
- Be empathetic in your responses to customer complaints and issues : Apologize for the impact that the setback has on their daily lives. This complication can waste time or money, or it can just cause them a huge headache. You don’t always know what’s going on in your clients’ day-to-day lives, so make an apology if they come to you to deal with a complication, large or small.
Customers are more likely to spend more and be loyal , longer, if they have had positive experiences with your business. Make every signature positive so that your customers feel good about their relationship with you.
2. Listen.
This is a lesson you may have learned when you were a student or in your first job, and it is also important in your customer contact work.
It is of the utmost importance to listen and responsibly follow up on every communication with a customer by providing a solution, discussion forum or useful educational resources such as video or articles from blog from which he can benefit.
Whether you communicate with your customers by phone, email, your support chat or even via social networks, your customers may think that contacting you will not solve their problem (because, let’s face it, it often is. when it comes to contacting customer service). Here are some ways to prove them wrong: (At least when they come to your support :))
If you can’t resolve a customer’s concern from the first interaction, give them an accurate and reasonable time frame within which they can expect a solution. Set a specific time and date, and give the person responsible for follow-up.
If your client has a complication that you resolve, follow up a week or two later to make sure they aren’t having the same issue again.
Better yet, do some research to find out when your customers typically experience issues with your product, and proactively communicate with educational communications to try to avoid that friction in the first place. (Once again, hence the importance of collecting feedback and processing it)
If you are managing a follow-up relationship with a group of clients, take the time to learn more about them and their business, and share personalized information from time to time.
3. Be transparent and communicative
It is extremely important to show transparency when communicating with your customers , especially if it is an error or malfunction caused by you or your product.
By demonstrating empathy and gratitude , feel free to explain the situation, apologize for the concern, and explain how it happened, and how it will not happen again. If it can happen again, be clear about it so your client can prepare for the future.
Particularly if your product or service relates to your customers’ personal data or information, or if your product serves as a registration system for a customer’s own business, you must take your responsibility to your customers seriously, that is an important factor of differentiation and even of competitive advantage in a given market.
In these days of data breaches and bank data breaches, customers want to know what you are doing to fix these kinds of complications and prevent them from happening again. Make sure you are prepared to communicate seamlessly with your customers at times like this and if not, ask your team leader or manager to guide you, or prepare. explanatory documentation in order to reassure your customers “concerns” upstream.
4. Ask your customers for feedback and act on it.
You can’t just use the phrase “ Satisfied customer “For form, you need to walk the talk by regularly asking and following up on customer feedback.
Regularly ask for customer feedback through surveys is an effective way to identify potential issues before they cause your customers to unsubscribe, stop purchasing your products, or consume your service.
Surveys also allow customers to express themselves about your product or customer service in a way that truly values them, and their specific feedback on individual interactions with employees gives you the opportunity to further refine your processes – or congratulate employees who go above and beyond.
Your business may already have a process in place for regularly soliciting feedback, in which case you don’t want to inundate your customers with additional communications that could tire them out of surveys.
If your company has already set up a feedback request process , be sure to solicit feedback in your private conversations with customers, for example during your product demonstration.
Although not official, qualitative feedback will help improve your service, and customers will appreciate it. the opportunity to be honest and share their opinions .
To communicate these surveys, different possibilities are available to you:
- You can use personalized email, emailing sequences inviting your client to complete a questionnaire.
- Contact him also by email to schedule a telephone or videoconference interview to collect his feedback.
- Create surveys on social networks, organization of physical or digital events
Learn all about customer satisfaction.
5. Make your customers happy whenever you can.
We are strong supporters of the idea of fully satisfying our customers, it does not date from this year, and to achieve this, a strategy based on the surprise effect is proving to be a catalyst.
Make sure you take the time to surprise your customers on a regular basis. You don’t necessarily need to surprise them with a freebie or discount (although that can be nice). Sometimes something as simple as a thank you letter, a gift from your organization, or a social media post can help build goodwill and emotional connection with your customers. And an emotional connection can sometimes be a better indicator of loyalty than responses to customer satisfaction surveys.
6. Speak like a human being.
Our last suggestion for your customers to like to interact with you even in case of questions, is simply to express yourself. like a human being .
Your customers don’t expect you to talk to them in too formal language when they call or write to you asking for help. Especially if you communicate with your customers on social networks, the formal language (Trop *) can be onner false and lacking in sincerity , a human approach will more easily establish a relationship of trust between you and your client. (We repeat ourselves but this creates a so-called “Privileged” relationship for your client and that he will appreciate)
If you are in the process of solving a customer’s problem, feel free to keep the language professional enough. But once you solve a customer’s problem, or if a customer contacts you with positive feedback, please feel free to be less formal and more personal .
Use good judgment in communicating with customers of authentic way , with your own voice. For example, if customers contact you on Twitter, feel free to respond with a GIF or hashtag. If you leave them a comment on Instagram, try embedding an emoji. In terms of attention, personal touches can make you endearing to your customers and make them more excited to connect with you.
In addition, to close the parenthesis on humanizing conversations with your customers , watch out for the Questions and Answers widget fully automated . Although these tools are very useful for your customers’ basic questions / requests, some will lose patience looking for their answer for 5 min through this tool or your FAQ without finding the least point of contact with a human behind. (Interactive chat coMrs. Crisp, support email, phone..)
Finally, T wilead can help you manage the relationship with your customers. Twilead is a all-in-one tool , that is, it fulfills the function of CRM where is all the data collected on your customers during their purchases or surveys carried out. This tool also allows you to create personalized intelligent sequences for prospecting / retaining your customers by integrating different channels such as LinkedIn or emailing via a multichannel approach . Finally, Twilead synchronizes your calendar and allows you to plan your customer/demo meetings.
To learn more about Twilead, feel free to book a demo of the tool.
Conclusion
Remember that behind every customer account is a human, just like you this person wants to have an experience by consuming your product / service. High quality customer relationship management will add tremendous value to your business as well as your brand. All too often, this is an underexploited competitive advantage! (Depending on the market of course)
Depending on your audience, who are your personalities, your customers will find / use different points of contact in order to exchange with you, as we have mentioned each technique presented above can help you to pass each interaction with your customers to the next level.
