If you want to create a better customer experience, then communication is key. In order to provide your customers with what they want and need, you need to be able to effectively communicate with them. This means listening to them, understanding their needs, and responding in a timely manner. By establishing good communication habits, you can ensure that your customers always feel heard and appreciated.
“Most companies have a product focus which means that most of the communication with their customers it’s created around their products/service rather than how their offerings are able to fulfill the customers’ needs,” says Ilenia Vidili, Customer Centricity Advisor, Keynote Speaker & Author, in Clootrack's 102 CX Expert report.
Wrong communication approaches can hurt your customer experience initiatives. If your customers feel they are not heard or served according to their desires, they might not proceed with your offerings. It is crucial that you let your customers keep updated and let them know that you care about their demands.
What is Customer Communication?
Customer Communication is the way a brand communicates with its customers to solve their queries and issues, share updates, upsell, cross-sell, and perform all activities that require brand-customer interaction. It is the primary way through which brands create a strong relationship with their customers.
A brand communicates with customers via several channels like social media, online forums, email, phones, offline one-to-one interaction, and many more. It is necessary for your brand to keep customer communication activities smooth and straightforward to make customers happy.
Why is Communication Important in Customer Experience?
If you're like most business leaders, you know that customer experience is key to a company's success. You also know that communication is critical to a great customer experience. But what happens when these two important areas intersect?
By developing a clear line of communication, businesses can ensure that they are delivering the best possible customer experience. In addition, effective communication can help organizations identify and solve problems quickly before they have a negative impact on the customer experience.
Customer experience is one of the most important aspects of business today. With so much competition, it’s essential to stand out from the crowd and provide exceptional customer service. Organizations that focus on communication will be better equipped to deliver an amazing customer experience that keeps customers coming back for more.
1) Quick Solutions
Hubspot research indicates that 90% of customers rate an "immediate" response as important or very important when they have a customer service question, and 60% of customers define "immediate" as 10 minutes or less.
It is a fact that poor communication hinders and delays internal and external operations. Executives and employees with good communication skills are a boon to a company because when they communicate fluently, they provide speedy solutions to customers and quick answers to CX agenda issues. Swift responses make customers happy and grant your brand enough time to experiment with a variety of potential solutions and end up with the best one.
2) Unambiguous Customer Service
A Gartner report reveals that customers facing high-effort customer service experience are 96% more likely to be disloyal and 81% more likely to convey negative word-of-mouth.
Errors in customer service put off the customers. Mistakes while handling customers are equal to either lost opportunities to convert a customer or unsuccessful attempts to retain customers. An unambiguous customer assistance scheme assures customers to stick with you in the long haul and motivates them to promote your brand through word-of-mouth. Having a well-structured customer communication system that comforts customers help your company become customer-centric, further helping you achieve your customer service goals with fewer customer-based hurdles.
3) High Retention and Acquisition Rates
Happy customers spread the positive word about the experiences, products, and services apart from making repeat purchases. Enhanced communication strategies help you retain and acquire customers. Brands that showcase their concerns about customer issues through words and then act on given promises leave a greater impact on customers' minds.
Adding value to customers by saving their time and efforts to find the right solution through good communication gets you enough traction that brings expected outcomes. At the market level, you get good attention and position as a leader to make things effortless for your stakeholders. And with that, it becomes easy enough for you to gain customer trust without much hustle.
What Are The Rules For an Effective Customer Communication?
A Salesforce report mentions that 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. Just having the desire to serve customers will not always work. To understand customer wants, you need to communicate excellently. Accurate comprehension is only possible when you communicate consciously and politely with your customers.
The best thing you can do is leverage communication following these 9 rules to offer a top-notch customer experience:-
1) Communicate the Definition of CX
“You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?” – Annette Franz, Founder and CEO at CX Journey, Inc.
If you have to improve customer experience, you need to have a definition to communicate to your internal stakeholders that guide them every time they work on any CX-driven project. As services and products vary for different industries and are very particular to brand offerings, you can solely depict the best customer experience your brand can or should provide to customers.
Action Tip:- Define a single CX objective for your whole brand and use that as your customer experience definition.
2) Share Customer Experience Vision With Customers
When you make your customers part of your CX agenda, it is more likely that your CX operations will be successful. Sharing your CX vision with customers comes with a lot of benefits, such as customers will pinpoint the issues in your vision, they will collaborate with you more often in every means as they feel special to be involved, and the awareness that customers carry will uplift their experience.
Also, you must draw a line between what you need to communicate and what needs to remain an internal commodity. The aim should be to pull profit for both parties, the customers and the brand.
Action Tip:- Whenever you finish a CX project, let your customers know what they can expect and ask them to share their thoughts.
3) Promote Communication Across Departments
By encouraging various business units to communicate and collaborate, you can overcome departmental silos and furnish customers with a better customer experience. Common CX goals become painless to achieve, and your brand can witness an increase in employee productivity. Furthermore, duplicate work reduces, saving your company's resources.
Set up an alliance strategy that makes every inter-departmental interaction less complicated. When employees cooperate, customer experience reaches to next level, as the union enriches and unites the outcomes of the individual department projects.
Action Tip:- Conduct meetings and educational sessions with employees in order to give them time to infuse trust among themselves and work with each other without friction.
4) Measure and Communicate Customer Expectations
Knowing customer expectations and acting on them promptly help you stand out in the crowded marketplace. Internal stakeholders must understand what customer expects from the brand because only then true customer experiences are offered.
Communicating customer requirements comes with clarity that removes the potential roadblocks for employees so they can operate daily trouble-free. Moreover, with set KPIs, you can check how much impact you are making on customers. You can readily interpret customer expectations and function accordingly to nourish customers with a pleasing customer experience.
Action Tip:- Listen carefully to your customers and enforce an action plan to align Voice of the Customer (VoC) with your business objectives.
5) Use Insights to Level Up Communication
The customer insights and analytics disclose everything you need to know about your customers. You can identify potential issues in your communication channels or customer communication with insights reports and fix them according to customers' wants.
The insights also display the possible areas where you can start enhancements or initiate a new operation to differentiate your brand from others. Overall, customer insights act as a guide that assists you in dealing with customers efficiently.
Action Tip:- Opt for a meaningful partnership with a customer experience analytics platform that provides you with valuable insights so you can make impactful decisions regarding customer communication and bring transformations that increase your customer base.
6) Communicate Uniformly Throughout Customer Journey
Salesforce's fifth edition State of the Connected Customer report indicates that 85% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments.
Broken interactions or experiences push customers away from your brand. To avoid such situations, you can communicate uniformly throughout the customer journey by building a strong customer experience strategy. How? Pre-plan every interaction you might expect with a customer and ensure the end-to-end customer experience for the customer remains worthwhile.
Action Tip:- Look for the points of contact where you have the highest customer complaints and fix the problems that customers raise. Simultaneously, go on repairing the issues by creating a solution loop for every customer contact point.
7) Execute CX Operations Effectively
You must set up an inter-organizational communication system to conduct the CX operations in your company with maximum effect. Receiving feedback from sales, marketing, tech, and other units serving customer demands directly or indirectly add more value to the CX operations.
CX executives and teams promoting assertive communication can make sure ingraining of customer-first culture. Also, the transparency due to smooth communication among CX staff members removes ambiguity and prevents issues that drain customer resources and trouble customers.
Action Tip:- Communicate operational requirements, strategies, and execution plans for customer experience undertakings beforehand to top executives and employees for better CX operation outputs.
8) Create an Omnichannel Communication Strategy
Customers prefer to use different channels according to their convenience. For example, a customer who discovered your brand on Instagram can possibly look for a query solution through email or an online customer support forum. So, it is critical that the customer gets the same answer for the query, whichever may be the communication channel used for exploration.
You have to have an omnichannel communication strategy that guarantees customers achieve what they desire from the brand with less number of engagement sessions. It is profitable at every turn when you communicate gracefully and make everything easier for customers.
Action Tip:- Make sure you interact with every single customer on all platforms they interact with you and listen to their concerns and be fast in solving problems.
9) Get Right Technology for Customer Communication
Today technology is so advanced that companies do not need representatives for repetitive customer queries and troubles. Choosing the right customer communication technology reduces the unnecessary burden on your employees and allows them to focus on more complex operations.
Chatbots, automated emails, virtual voice assistance, and such technological customer support act as a helping hand. These tech additions also help you serve a lot of customers at the same time. The right tools and technology never fail to deliver round-the-clock customer service.
Action Tip:- Research new technologies in the market and consider the financial situation of your brand. Look for how much you can fund for the technology you require and how much profit it will bring, and then act accordingly.
What Are The Best Practices of Customer Communication For Better CX?
While communicating with potential buyers and existing consumers, there are a few communication etiquettes to keep in mind. Following these will create a comfortable environment and make the customer-brand relationship stronger.
Below given are the top 5 best customer communication practices you can instill in your organization to furnish customers with better CX:-
1) Listen Actively
You can avoid misunderstandings while interacting with customers if you follow the active listening practice. Not only does it solve customer issues, but also makes them happy because it does not leave space for errors. Customers feel the convenience as they are mindful of your involvement in their problems and concerns. Listening actively to customers increases the relevancy of your offerings.
2) Never Use Jargon
For customers, it's troubling to comprehend the language you speak at work. Undoubtedly, it might be easy for you, but why trouble customers with the technical language which wrecks their experiences? Use simple language that customers can soak in with ease. Such a manner of conducting with clients will enable them to reach for your services more often, boosting your credibility.
3) Show Empathy
Whether you communicate through text or voice call, your words should reflect that you are sensible enough towards the situations with which customers have reached out to you. On top of that, it creates a good impression on customers and helps you establish a real connection. Empathizing with customers assists you in getting into their shoes which obtain outstanding advantages for your company.
4) Personalize Message
By personalizing customer messages, you gain the confidence of your customers regarding your services. With personalized communication, customers sense friendliness and individualized considerations in your services, which makes them happy, uplifting your brand reputation. Delighted customers evolve as a profitable asset to your brand and become a primary revenue source. So, do not forget to personalize messages in every customer communication channel for each customer.
5) Use Cheerful Phrases
Customers can recognize your emotions through the terms and expressions you use while communicating with them. It is essential for you to use cheerful phrases like, "Happy to help!", "Thanks for bringing this to our attention!", "Nice to meet you. How can I help you?", and many such. These joyful gestures will make consumers cherish their association with your brand, which eventually generates higher ROI.
To Wrap Up
Delivering excellent customer experience requires teamwork and communication. By getting everyone on the same page and setting up systems that facilitate communication between departments, you can create a customer-centric culture that will deliver the best possible CX for your customers.
With a nicely-put customer communication method, you can increase conversion rate by providing quick solutions and appropriate customer services. In this content piecework, you have learned ways to leverage communication to bring your customer experience proceedings up to the mark. Apply them, monitor the communication functions, and track your small wins to stay motivated and drive frequent modifications.
Now that you are fully confident about the role of communication in improving customer experience, understand how to Break Through 7 Barriers to Deliver a Better Customer Experience!