Customer Communication: 8 Tips to Save Time and Money

How you talk the talk says a lot about how you walk the walk.

Modern business communication is developed on the premise of customer-centricity. With an ever-increasing availability of similar products and services, it’s easier now than ever for consumers to switch from one business to another. In this changing landscape, prioritizing the customer journey through customer communication will give you the competitive edge you need.

Simply answering support requests doesn’t cut it anymore. Companies need to strategize better customer communication practices to ensure loyalty and satisfaction. Businesses that recognize the need to automate administrative and management tasks can improve customer service and provide unique value.

Customer communication management (CCM) software can help drive success across the board by enabling your teams to identify, understand, and implement communication strategies that fit your business model.

The best way to understand the importance of customer service communication is by acknowledging that your customers are your primary stakeholders. There is a need for regular dialogue and feedback collection systems to maintain those relationships.

Why is customer communication important?

Think about all the services you use as a customer yourself. How much does the way the company communicates affect your experience with the products?

Similarly, as a business, communicating with your customers is the first and final step of the customer service delivery process. Regardless of your industry, you serve many customers, and they are the ones that enable business growth.

Gone are the product-first days where manufacturing and distribution were the key players in setting a business up for success. As industries expand and automation takes over processing, companies recognize the need to focus on the customer experience (CX) above everything else.

One significant facet of CX is how communication is handled regarding client questions, product reviews, feedback collection, and other customer queries.

Here are the main ways in which customer communication plays a part in business operations:

Increased customer satisfaction and retention

When your customers feel like you are actively listening to them, they are bound to continue buying from you. Effective customer communication shows you’re reliable and can win the trust and loyalty of clients. Doing so also ties into collecting customer feedback which in turn increases customer satisfaction.

Customer retention directly results from higher satisfaction rates when consumers recognize that companies offer them support. The right communication strategy can go a long way when dealing with frustrated customers and building long-term relationships.

Higher conversion rate

Conversations are the new conversions. The best part about investing in customer communication is that you can leverage it to convert sales with customers at every stage of the buying journey.

Many businesses make the mistake of paying close attention to customer interactions only when they are close to making a purchase decision. But they couldn’t be further from the truth.

Do not let customers feel like they’re only a sales opportunity. Customer-centric organizations know that customer acquisition and conversion are easier when leaders and teams are involved with potential users right from the start. This could include providing guidance for the product via live demos or helping the customer discover what products meet their needs through advanced CCM solutions.

Quick problem resolution

We all have certain people we go to with our problems. For a business, customer service should bring out that sentiment in their consumers. And that is only made possible with the proper communication methods. While it’s essential to have a knowledgeable support team, they must convey that information in a way that is easy to understand.

Focus on providing solutions rather than reading technical jargon from company pages and product catalogs. Listen to the client’s question and point them in the right direction or, in some cases, the more appropriate point of contact.

Streamlined message delivery

Companies love spending time and money on brand management. Customer communication drives brand value through consistent messaging and delivery to consumers across platforms.

Customer service communication helps maintain the tone and voice of the brand and its leaders, as they are at the core of any customer interaction. This allows businesses to stay true to their values while talking to users. From receiving feedback on reviews to promoting social media campaigns, customer communication bridges the gap between the mission of a business and its end users.

Customer communication challenges

To perfect your customer communication, you need a detailed picture of your customer and their thought process. But this is not the simplest of tasks, and getting your entire organization to see that the customer is most important can be a struggle.

Unclear ownership

Nothing is more irritating for customers than continuous hand-offs. While it’s great to have multiple teams that want to handle customer interactions, it can be confusing to customers. Important information and updates can be lost in translation and the more time it takes to reach the right person, the less value you end up delivering to your customers.

A simple solution is to leverage CCM tools for company-wide customer interactions. Doing so can enable stakeholders to stay on track with the latest conversations and help customers with subsequent stages of issue resolution.

Non-aligned objectives

Good customer service contains many facets. This may mean hiring the right people to build relationships for small businesses, while enterprises may focus more on retention. Whatever your customer service goals are, it is essential to align them with the more significant objectives in every department. Conflicting goals can often cause friction between teams, leading to an overall disruption of the communication process.

To prevent this, invest time and resources in establishing a transparent system for all kinds of communications. Encourage people to set up metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that are necessary for their daily work and extend to overall customer satisfaction. Establish a single source of truth for all customer communications. This way, you’re ensuring that accountability to the business and customer is everyone’s priority.

How to improve your service with customer communication management (CCM)

Customer communication management is the process of establishing customer relationships and reducing pain points through regular, consistent, and high-quality communication. Customer communication management is not a one-time activity and spans over various channels across departments.

Customer service practices heavily depend on having systematic and accurate communication strategies while collecting customer data. Reps must then filter the data by the type and size of the issue via CCM tools. This can be in the form of dashboards, analytics, or even user-generated reports, which are then conveyed across multiple synchronous and asynchronous messaging channels such as email, live chats, phone, or social media.

By understanding the target audience and their requirements, customer communication management platforms can transform the customer service experience by managing several communications simultaneously.

Leveraging customer communication for cross-functions

If you thought customer service communication is solely a customer support function, you might not be a customer-first business yet. Everything you do is targeted at the end-user, from creating product roadmaps to marketing. So why not carry out company-wide training in customer communication?

Product

When customer service and product departments align on common goals, such as creating a positive user experience, they can use the shared knowledge to achieve just that.

You can go about this collaboration by deciding on a single feedback system and user-friendly CCM software. This will help you stay updated on the contexts of problems and enable seamless communication. This also helps eliminate the need for several complicated systems causing ambiguity and conflict.

Sales

The sales department often works in silos. But integrating them within the customer support environment can help them hit their goals by staying connected with all communication channels.

By combining the customer relationship management (CRM) tool with a CCM solution, sales reps can make their job easier through data-centric communication. Integrating this information into sales calls can help customers find products that are right for them, thus leading to customer satisfaction furthered by support from the service team.

Operations

This team is no stranger to complex processes, tools, and setups. But what they might not be familiar with is the benefits of collaborating in more accessible ways, such as email or messaging apps. The ops department has tons of valuable information that different teams can use to maintain a consistent flow of communication.

Customer success

The customer success department is the pillar of any business. While the terminology might differ based on the company’s size, customer success managers (CSMs) are most concerned with improving the customer journey. When you equip them with the know-how of customer communication, they can build long-term relationships and brand loyalty.

Best practices for effective customer communication

A well-formulated customer communication strategy ensures your business and service reps have a plan when interacting with customers. It can also help align different sales, marketing, and revenue teams to agree on objectives that are central to the customer and drive business.

1. Invest in omnichannel communication

If you’re not on every channel your customer is on, you’re missing out on those conversations and potential sales. Customer communication management begins by investing in omnichannel communication to target specific audience groups that are most active.

The most common channels include phone, text, email, chatbots, social media platforms, company websites, and third-party apps.

“I love having multiple mediums of communication with my customers. I have a lot of clients where we share a Slack channel, and I get responses so much faster with them."

Carly Cozad
Strategic Customer Success Manager at G2

When building out your omnichannel communication strategy, focus on three main things:

Where are your customers?

Identify the platform where your customer demographic is active, engaged, and most likely to respond.

If your business’s target audience falls in the age group of 35-50 years, spending time and resources on Instagram and Tik Tok is pointless. Email and text messaging (SMS) is probably the best way to communicate with these users.

Why do they want to communicate?

There are myriad reasons why customers call for assistance. Ranging from understanding the product, registering complaints, or upgrading their existing features and plans. 

Having a clear understanding of a few main customer pain points and the channels through which they arise is essential to synchronize communication. For example, customer reviews are most likely to appear on your website or product pages, while campaign-specific questions will come through social media messages.

How do they want to be contacted?

This is probably the most understated communication need of all time: always ask your customers how they want to be contacted.

Develop questionnaires every quarter or annually asking customers what their preferred mode of communication is and how frequently they want to be contacted. Polls and surveys are a great way to get substantial insights into customers and their preferences.

Source: Indigo9Digital Inc

2. Equip customer support with the right technology

Most businesses are becoming tech-based entities. As processes become increasingly automated for users, it is only natural for your customer service reps to also operate with the right technology and tools. 

While interactive voice response (IVR) systems are suitable for saving time on frequently asked questions, switch up your customer service tool kit to encompass more advanced technologies for all client interactions.

Live chats and chatbots powered through AI are a great way to get your customer service team to register and respond to questions within seconds. They provide real-time customer support and feedback and can be used to create a knowledge base. Many companies name their chatbots with real names, creating brand value through personalization and innovation in their outbound communications.

Along with this, video chats and collaborative browsing (or co-browsing) enable collaboration and seamless interaction from the first touchpoint.

Customer communication management software has a more advanced functionality as it can execute several tasks at once and collate the data in a streamlined manner. This reduces the probability of errors and enhances service delivery.

Source: Twitter

3. Outline and evaluate customer service communication metrics

As with any business activity, setting up objectives and tracking performance is integral to implementing a customer communication strategy.

Below are some metrics to consider when measuring customer service communication progress:

First Response Time (FRT)

A lot can happen in the time between a customer asking a question and receiving an answer. Studies have shown that companies typically take up to 12 hours to respond to customer emails, resulting in a negative experience. Organizations must strive to improve their response time to maintain customer satisfaction.

FRT can be calculated by dividing service reps’ total time to respond to customers by the number of responses provided. It is a handy metric for identifying gaps in customer service and improving performance. 

Average resolution time (ART)

Another critical metric to monitor is the average time it takes your customer support team to resolve client questions. This is a good way to gauge how the team is performing and the key areas of improvement to heighten productivity levels.

Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)

This one’s a no-brainer. Most companies measure customer satisfaction through net promoter score (NPS) or customer satisfaction score (CSAT) for insights on how happy customers are with the product, service, and overall experience. They help regulate customer interactions to troubleshoot common problems in communication and operations.

Source: Myfeelback

4. Collect customer feedback regularly

Feedback is a gold mine. Extracting your customers’ feedback can significantly improve customer service and experience. The way you communicate and receive feedback says a lot about who you are as a business and what your core values are. In addition, gathering feedback can hone overall communication skills by learning to cope with drawbacks and failures. 

Best-in-class firms use analytics to track and analyze customer communications. And those same businesses constantly close the feedback loop with their consumers.

There are various methods of collecting feedback. Some of the most popular ways are long-form surveys, in-app questions, phone calls, and emails. NPS surveys also act as excellent feedback mechanisms to understand customer perception.

Customer reviews have become the holy grail for potential buyers in their purchase journey - and for good reason. Reviews are deemed credible and influence customer decisions by gaining their trust. They are also a great way for a company to get insights into what users are saying about them and resolve problems accordingly.

Source: Techcrunch

5. Align content production with customer needs

Understanding content production and distribution are vital to the customer communication management process. Providing valuable and relevant information to your customers empowers them to help themselves when faced with common problems. Creating good content can reduce service errors and ambiguity by predicting customer issues and outlining solutions.

There are multiple content formats available that can be implemented to better communicate with prospects:

• Product demos and catalogs
• How-to guides and tutorials
• Blogs
• Knowledge bases
• Case studies

Source: Gong

6. Develop internal communication systems

You might think there’s nothing worse than an uninformed customer service professional when you’re trying to get support on an issue - but there is. Having to bounce around departments and repeat your problem to different reps creates a poor experience.

Building clear and coherent internal communication systems can help increase response time by enabling streamlined cross-functional communication. Ensure that support tickets are seen by customer support and the concerned department (such as product, engineering, or sales). This eliminates confusion so customers can get the necessary information without getting frustrated and dissatisfied.

Source: 9to5Mac

7. Personalization is the secret

Machines are great, but they can never replace the personal touch of human interaction. Customers want to talk to a real person because it feels more relatable and shows they are not just a number. 

Personalized communication sets the tone for a business and can foster brand loyalty. Targeted suggestions, follow-ups by a support specialist, provision of discounts, one-on-one calls, and reward programs are ways you can personalize your communication through preferred channels.

Source: GoVisually

8. Keep an eye and ear on social media

Social media is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to increase brand awareness and reach your audience. However, communicating on social media is a whole different ball game. You need to understand where your audience is and how to engage them on various platforms.

Try integrating social channels in your business communications through product release announcements, company updates, demand generation campaigns, and event participation. Since social media is always buzzing, it gives you greater insights into consumer behavior and can also earn prospects through referral marketing.

Source: Wix

True communication is listening to what isn't being said

Customer communication is not a singular, time-based activity. It relies on developing effective strategies to understand the right communication type for your customers. Your customer base is ever-changing and with the voice of the customer gaining more attention, it is necessary to monitor the way your business communicates with its primary stakeholders. 

When done well, customer communication has the power to influence customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and revenue. So start listening to what your customers are saying.

Understanding customer behavior becomes easier when you know what they need. Use customer journey analytics for boosted efficiency, better engagement, and higher conversions.