Customer communication is crucial for the growth and long-term success of any business. As a critical factor in improving your company’s services, establishing good customer communication practices should be one of your top priorities when evaluating your business goals.
Whether you’re dealing with product concerns or positive feedback from your customers, you must put effort into improving your customer service. A study by NewVoiceMedia found that businesses in the U.S. lose more than $62 billion a year due to poor customer service, which is why having reliable communication is essential for a good customer experience.
It sounds like a lot of work. But know that not everything requires hands-on interaction to improve customer experience. In this technological age, you can simply elevate your customer communication through automation.
Automating interactions can save you time and effort while ensuring that customer service is fast and consistent. To know more, here are some tips on how to use automation for effective customer communication.
1. Utilize chatbots
To create a more streamlined process of dealing with customer concerns, you can start using chatbots for further customer engagement. While this may seem one-sided and robotic in a way, chatbots have improved over the years and can now perform real-time two-way communication with customers.
Chatbots use artificial intelligence to pick up usual customer requests and respond to these accordingly. These bots are programmed to follow a set of rules or “triggers” to help them come up with the appropriate answer to frequently asked questions.
Establishing a connection with your customer through chatbots will lessen the workload of your employees and provide a speedy response to customer inquiries. This process will help improve customer engagement and leave them satisfied with your timely service.
You have to take note that chatbots can only do so much when addressing customer concerns. Some issues need proper support by a live agent to address the problem. In this case, you can also utilize the chatbot to screen the inquiries and know if they need to route specific issues to the right personnel for further assistance.
2. Arrange trigger-based SMS campaigns
SMS marketing campaigns use text messaging to reach out to customers. SMS has become a useful platform for brand promotion and customer communication, such as sending offers, updates, promos, or alerts.
Automated SMS campaigns are not sent randomly. This requires a “trigger,” which can be a one-off communication or a form of re-engagement to customers. For example, one-time communication may include reminders of appointments, confirmation that their order has been processed, or a receipt of their payment.
Re-engagement text marketing campaigns specifically help rekindle the communication between businesses and their customers. You can use SMS as a reminder to check their emails or persuade them to continue their subscription.
3. Make it more personal
Automation does not necessarily mean purely sticking with a script and sending them to every customer. To promote real engagement, you should personalize the automated messages when reaching out to your customers. Customers favor businesses that see them as a person, not just another number in their database.
Personalizing customer experience should not be limited to only sending messages with the customer’s first name and offering deals and other announcements tailored to fit a specific segment.
Rather than having a one-size-fits-all approach for all your segments, it is better to target their particular interest and know what is relevant to them at the moment. This entails analyzing data collected from the person to match appropriate recommended content and products and services for them.
Personalizing your marketing strategies will not only improve sales but also build customer loyalty and trust.
4. Record and measure customer communication metrics
Tracking and analyzing the right metrics will help you identify which customer service factors need further improvement. For example, if you get poor customer feedback about responding too slow to inquiries, you can reevaluate your processes to help reduce response times.
It is essential to consider these factors in your customer communication metrics: first response time (FRT), average resolution time (ART), and customer satisfaction (CSAT). With such insights, it will be easier to pinpoint what went wrong and immediately work on how to improve it.
Wrapping It Up
Switching to an automated system is a crucial step to strengthening your relationship with your customers. Aside from saving you the effort, it will also streamline your overall process and let you maintain connections with the people you serve.
Whether through utilizing chatbots and AI, setting up trigger-based SMS, or making interactions more personalized, automation has become a defining factor for the overall success of your business.
Despite the benefits of automation in improving customer interaction, it is still crucial to know the boundary between machines and humans. It is up to you to identify where human interaction is needed more than automation. Remember that some concerns are better addressed through personal interaction to build trust and form relationships with your clients.