Customer communication is more important now than ever before. While there are multiple reasons why customers need to contact your business, most of the time it’s out of necessity and if everything else fails to solve their problem.
However, just because your clients see this as an inconvenient task, that doesn’t mean you can’t turn it into a positive experience for them.
If you want your customer communications to be effective and leave a good impression, you always have to be easily accessible, available, and provide swift and accurate responses. But most importantly of all, you need to use the right channels.
Customer support helpdesk
If you need a way to solve your customers’ problems more efficiently, you should have a lot of different resources at your disposal. Ideally, your customer support reps should have all the information about a customer they’re talking to so they can provide highly personalized support.
All of this can be achieved with a helpdesk. As much as 86% of service teams note that having a help desk system increases their productivity, and companies that use this kind of software are known for their fast and accurate customer support.
There are a few ways a service desk can help your customer service team become more customer-centric than ever before:
- Proactive support. Undoubtedly, the biggest benefit is the ability to provide proactive support to your customers instead of waiting for support tickets.
- Increased productivity. A helpdesk manages and organizes all of your tickets and assigns them to the appropriate agent. With the use of words and phrases, you can categorize tickets effortlessly into open and closed cases and find solutions quickly.
- Advanced reporting. If you use a helpdesk, you can track each employee’s productivity and tag tickets with labels such as a due date and closed date, and set targets that need to be met. Later on, you can run reports and see each employee’s performance and how well they’re meeting demand.
In case you’re using WordPress to run your website, you can easily add a WordPress helpdesk plugin and reap all of the benefits without any hassle. This kind of tool will increase your efficiency and productivity while saving your support agents’ time.
Social media
The power social media gives to businesses of all niches around the world is extraordinary, which only shows the importance of an online presence for your business. Most people nowadays discover brands on social media, and they also communicate with their favorite companies via different social media platforms.
Communicating with customers this way has many advantages, but one of the biggest is that some of these platforms represent the only public customer contact channel. This means that many replies are public, and companies can use that not only for customer service but for marketing as well.
However, we can’t talk about social media without mentioning one of the leading platforms used for business – LinkedIn. The amount of conversations on it keeps growing. As a matter of fact, only in 2020 LinkedIn saw a 55% increase in conversations.
You can use LinkedIn to converse with other people in your industry and keep up with all of the latest industry developments. In addition, you can send invitations to connect with anyone, and all of those connections will be saved.
Once you connect with someone, you can see their profile and all of their connections as well, which opens a lot of networking opportunities. And the best thing about this is that communication via LinkedIn is easy, but especially if you use a LinkedIn automation service. This tool will automate all the dull tasks and save you time and effort that you can spend on other activities.
And if you want to ensure contacts find you on LinkedIn due to your expertise, you can create engaging content for the platform. Posts such as images, links to other websites, and simple text posts can attract other users and of course, customers.
Chatbots
Chatbots have become one of the most popular customer contact channels in the last few years and their popularity just keeps growing. Unlike live chats which require an employee to answer customer questions and queries, chatbots do this with the help of artificial intelligence.
It’s important to note that chatbots can never be an alternative to all of your other channels because they can’t provide answers to more complex questions. However, they can answer some of the basic FAQs and handle simple requests.
Here are some of the benefits you will see if you implement a chatbot:
- Improved communication. When customers contact your business via chatbot, the software will pull all of the data it receives. This includes things such as their preferences and history with your company, all of which will help you understand your customers and improve communication with them.
- Constant customer support. If your customer service still relies only on channels such as phone calls, live chat, and emails, you’re losing a lot of customers because you’re not constantly available. With chatbots, you won’t have this issue, since they are always running and available 24/7.
- Connecting customers with the right agents. Even though chatbots can’t provide answers to complicated queries, they can still understand conversation contexts. When someone asks a question the chatbot isn’t able to answer, the tool will direct the customer straight to the appropriate agent.
- Passing language barriers. If you’re an international company with clients from all over the world, you might have issues with language barriers. Luckily, chatbots come with a vast knowledge stream that includes multi-lingual support, which means you can provide answers and solutions in any language.
Video chat
Even though this channel of communication still hasn’t peaked in popularity among businesses, it’s a powerful tool to have in your arsenal. Video chat appeals to younger generations much more than traditional methods of communication such as email and telephone.
When all’s said and done, you can’t deny that there’s no replacement for face-to-face communication, even if it’s digital.
The benefits you can expect from video chat include:
- Providing real-time and personalized service. Some customers don’t like chatbots and similar channels of communication but prefer talking to an agent instead. Since video-chats have a real-time nature, they satisfy the need to talk to a human being, while also allowing for much more personalized service.
- Quicker problem resolution. There is a big difference between when a customer tries to explain an issue over the phone or via chat than when they’re explaining it face-to-face. This method is more efficient and it helps agents identify the problem much faster, and in turn, find a solution or answer promptly.
- More opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. This type of personalized service allows your agents to make more money for your business without putting in too much effort. It’s easier to convince someone to buy a more expensive or additional product when they’re talking to someone face to face.
Final thoughts
Your company wouldn’t be where it is today without its customers, so you need to ensure that those people who are trusting you with their business are satisfied with the services you provide. This is why effective communication and excellent customer service are among the most important pillars of every successful company.
Thanks to digitalization and the development of technology, communication has become easier than ever. It’s up to you if you’re going to take advantage of all of the technology this modern world has to offer to make your customer communication better than ever before.