Every time a customer interacts with your business, it affects your customer experience.
This applies regardless of if you answer a question through live chat or like a social media post. Done right, the impact of positive customer interactions can develop trust and long-lasting relationships.
Also, it is an excellent way to get customer feedback and change casual clients into loyal ones. In this article, we’ll look at the benefits of customer interaction and how to improve it in your business.
Knowing this, let’s begin!
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Why is good customer interaction important?
Good customer is beneficial to your business in many ways, including:
Provides important business insights
Talking to customers can help you get feedback to improve your business performance. Using the data from these conversations, you’ll understand what encourages customer loyalty.
Customer interaction also helps you learn your strengths and weaknesses. With this, you can make adjustments and create a better customer experience.
Helps enhance customer voice behaviors
Customer voice behaviors describe interactions where clients provide opinions to improve your services. By interacting with customers, you can stimulate customer voice behaviors to get genuine opinions.
Also, it can give you ideas that can help boost customer satisfaction.
Helps to understand your customers
Regular communication with customers will help you learn about their needs and preferences. With this, you can categorize customers using their interests, behaviors, and traits. It is then easier to tailor your services for better customer satisfaction scores.
Reduces customer churn rate
Many factors, including high costs & unhappy customers, lead to a higher churn rate. By talking to your clients, you can prove that you care about their opinions. You’ll also learn what affects customer voice behaviors and improve upon them.
If done right, you can deal with negative customer feedback and change unhappy clients into loyal ones. Ultimately, you will reduce the customer churn rate, meaning more revenue in the long run.
Improves brand loyalty
Customer loyalty is the level of dedication clients have to your brand and how willing they are to make repeat purchases. In contrast, brand loyalty shows how both customers and members of the public perceive your brand.
You can improve both of these aspects by interacting with customers frequently. Customers sense it when a business values them.
Offering quality customer support service through meaningful conversations can change customer perceptions and encourage them to recommend your business to others.
10 Ways To Improve Customer Interactions
Now that you know the benefits of customer interaction, how can you interact with customers better? In this section, we’ll show you some of the best strategies that you can implement in your business to achieve it.
1. Show Empathy
While it may not seem like a lot, showing empathy to your customers can be a great way to improve interaction. If you teach your staff to approach all interactions with empathy, the rest will fall into place.
So, how do you do this? Here are a few ways
a. Say Thank You
First, always say thank you for trusting your business. If there is an issue like a service disruption, thank them for staying patient and understanding your business.
Most clients will be willing to forgive you if you accept your shortcomings and genuinely apologize when things go wrong. Also, thank them for giving your business feedback, even if you don’t like it. Always say thank you!
b. Validate Their Experiences
Many businesses make the mistake of trying to counter the issues customers face using their service. This is mostly because they feel the issue is with the customers themselves.
While this might seem like a good approach, it really isn’t, as it results in frustrating interactions and destroys customer relationships. Instead, validate their experiences even if you feel they are in the wrong.
Then, try to provide a solution in a polite manner. This form of upliftment can help improve your customer interaction and improve their relationship with your business.
When you show empathy during customer interactions, they feel valued and more willing to do repeat business with you.
2. Actively Listen
One of the most important strategies for improving customer interaction is listening. When dealing with a customer, you’ll need to actively listen instead of interrupting them at every turn.
This gives them enough time to pour out their minds before you provide a solution.
Regardless of if your customer-employee interaction is going on through phone, email, live chat, or social media, the strategy should stay the same. If you cannot deal with the problem at that point, provide them with an accurate time frame to expect a solution.
3. Transparent communicative
Honestly is non-negotiable when interacting with customers. This is particularly crucial if the problem arises from your product or service.
First, explain the issue and apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused.
Then, make it clear that the issue won’t repeat itself and the steps you are taking to prevent it. In the unlikely event that the problem might repeat itself later, give your clients a heads-up. This way, they can prepare properly, thus reducing the impact.
Also, you’ll want to be transparent regarding changes to pricing, policies, and procedures. You don’t want your customers to be caught unawares, as it seems you are purposely keeping them in the dark.
Ensure you are ready to always communicate with your customers, so they will value all your interactions.
4. Request regular feedback
Getting feedback and working on it is another great strategy for improving customer interaction. In business, the reality is that you can never anticipate all the likely problems your customers will face.
Therefore, you must provide outlets for customers to tell you about their experience with your organization.
It also implies that you’ll provide them with a phone number, email address, or 24/7 live chat feature. With these, your customers can leave feedback anytime it suits them. Sometimes, you may have to be proactive in getting this feedback.
To this end, using surveys is a safe bet. They can help you point out likely issues that could prevent your customers from doing business with you.
Moreover, with surveys, customers can pen down their feelings about your business in detail. Once you have the information you need, work on correcting the problems addressed by this feedback and see your customer interaction improve.
In addition to the above, here are some more ways to get feedback:
- Use Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook stories
- Offer clients an incentive anytime they leave feedback
- Build an online forum where customers can share feedback and experiences
- Encourage clients to leave reviews on your Google page
- Organize an interactive social media contest to boost engagement
Remember that feedback is only useful if you make changes using the information provided. Lastly, you’ll want to keep your clients in the loop. If you have worked on the feedback and made changes, inform your customers.
This will show you value their insights and are serious about constant improvement.
5. Follow up after solving issues
Many businesses believe that once a customer’s problem has been resolved, the interaction ends. While this seems logical, it does not apply in business, especially when dealing with loyal customers.
Instead, after you resolve the problems and make sure they are happy with your service, follow up. You can do this by sending a feedback survey through email.
Satisfied customers will gladly provide feedback which improves your customer interaction and overall customer relationships.
6. Personalize customer feedback
Personalization is another powerful tool that can help improve customer interaction.
You can tailor your interactions to the specific preferences and needs of individual customers to make it unique to them. This makes it feel less than a transaction but like a friendly conversation between friends.
Fortunately, there are many ways to do this which we’ll cover below.
a. Add a Personal Touch:
Address customers by name during every interaction. This reduces the feeling of it being transactional as we already mentioned.
Also, take special days like birthdays seriously. By sending personalized messages on these special days, clients will feel valued. Ultimately, it will ensure better engagement and foster customer relationships.
b. Tailored Recommendations:
Offer services or product recommendations using customer data. For instance, you can study the previous purchases of a customer before an interaction.
This can give you insights into what they like so you can properly recommend products and address them.
c. Speak Naturally:
Another way of boosting customer communication is to use your natural voice. Anytime a client reaches out to you, speak as you would a friend instead of a script. When a customer is reaching out to you, they don’t want a textbook response.
Instead, try to be yourself and only use professional language when necessary. By appearing approachable when interacting with customers, you create openness which makes them comfortable with you.
Ultimately, you’ll be able to develop genuine relationships with them.
What’s more, you’ll want to implement empathy and active listening just as we already mentioned. They are great for making customers feel heard and connecting with them on an emotional level.
For this to work effectively, you’ll need to train your employees to see customers as people first. Then provide them with all the tools they need to help customers in a way that they can personally relate to.
7. Interact across channels
The platform you are using to communicate with your customers is another important part of customer interaction.
Everyone has a specific outlet they prefer to use when getting answers to questions. Study your customers and find out if they prefer answers through live chat, email, or social media.
Remember that some of them may prefer to get answers themselves using a FAQ page.
While it may seem like a great choice to be present on all channels, it may not be the best strategy. Doing this only increases your expenses and it will be impossible to balance your efforts on all channels.
Instead, do your findings and focus on channels that your customers engage with more. For instance, if you notice more customers reach via telephone, focus there.
The age of your average customers can also help you determine the right channel. If you have an older customer base, sticking with traditional options like telephone and email may be the right choice.
In contrast, you may want to channel your focus to social media if you have a younger user base.
If you can figure out where your customers spend time and do the same – you can develop meaningful relationships with them over time.
8. Provide timely rsponses
The world today is fast-paced, and customers want efficient and fast responses.
In fact, many customers who are trying to reach your support team will end up leaving if it takes too much time to connect to an agent. Worse still, most of them will refuse to do business with you anymore.
You’ll want to reduce the hold time to the barest minimum if you are serious about improving customer satisfaction.
Even if you can’t respond in a timely manner, customers will prefer businesses that set clear expectations regarding response times. Regardless of if you are using a chatbot or actual customer support, customers must know when to expect a response.
This will help them manage their expectations and ensure they do not get frustrated waiting for a response.
Giving your employees the tools to quickly resolve problems is also important when it has to do with improving customer satisfaction. If a client is sure of fast resolution of issues whenever they contact your support team, it can build trust and loyalty.
This strategy also ensures that all your customer interactions are handled effectively, leading to a better customer experience.
9. Provide unexpected gifts
Rewarding your customers with unexpected gifts can ensure a positive customer experience. What’s more, it builds long-term excitement and improves relationships with customers. However, this strategy is not as easy as it seems.
Clients will only appreciate gifts that appeal to them personally.
So, what does this mean? You can’t just send out random rewards to customers and hope it’ll make them happy. Instead, you must first understand the needs of your clients and what makes them happy.
Then, personalize the gift and send it to them for the best outcome.
Other ways to appreciate customers include:
- Sending personalized notes to show appreciation
- Giving them a shout out on social media. You can also appreciate their patronage in this manner.
- Offering exclusive discounts on their favorite purchases. For example, if a particular customer enjoys purchasing kitchen wares, offer them a discount for products in this section. They are more likely to appreciate it instead of a discount in an unrelated section.
While all the options work wonders, sticking with a simple thank-you note is a safe bet if you are on a budget.
They are simple, and show customers how much you appreciate them. What’s more, it comes with the added element of surprise, especially when hidden in their purchases – thus elevating the entire customer experience.
10. Build a strong online presence
We have already mentioned that it is unwise to focus on all the support outlets. However, this does not mean you should not have an online presence.
Social media messages and comments will provide you with genuine feedback that’ll help improve customer interaction. Here, customers don’t need lots of encouragement to leave feedback and will do so willingly.
Note that your duty does not stop at monitoring posts alone. It is your responsibility to respond quickly anytime someone interacts with your business online.
Ideally, try to respond to messages within an hour of getting them. We recommend you invest in a 24/7 social media team, as customers love a business they can reach anytime.
11. Train your customer service team
The reality is that, in most cases, your customers will be interacting with your support team and not you. This becomes even worse when you have a large business.
The implication of this is that, if you have a team that does not understand the rules of proper interaction – the results will be the same.
Make sure you invest in properly training your team on how to speak with customers. Let them know the importance of good customer interaction and how it can affect your business. If the team is on board, achieving your objectives will be easier.
12. Leverage chatbots for interactions
AI is taking the world by storm and smart organizations are already using it to improve efficiency. IBM states that chatbots can help reduce 30% of your customer service costs by speeding up response times.
Aside from saving costs, you also increase your overall customer satisfaction.
Currently, it is not possible to replace humans with chatbots, but they can help improve various parts of your interaction. The right chatbot can instantly respond to customer queries and get rid of unnecessary wait times.
Conclusion
As you can see, proper customer relationship management is vital and starts with providing value for your clients. Show empathy, actively listen, and be transparent in your communication to make life easier for your clients.
People are more likely to buy from you based on how you make them feel.
Remember that your customers are essential for the long-term growth of your business. If you can make them happy, they can be a good source of repeat business who’ll advertise your services to their friends.
Use all of the strategies we’ve discussed in this guide and see an improvement in your customer engagement.