There are certain ways that your support team can interact with customers that work better than others. Whether they’re communicating with customers via text message, email or phone, support should be equipped with successful communication tactics to ensure the customer has a positive experience. But before they can execute the basics of enabling meaningful support conversations — through actively listening, understanding the issue and responding meaningfully — your support team needs the right tools and strategies to open up two-way conversations.
Two-way conversations are among the most effective strategies to reinforce your trustworthiness as a brand and, at the same time, learn from your customers. If it’s not easy to get in touch with your support team, how will you know what customers like about your product and what they’re frustrated with?
Here are some of the ways organizations can have the kind of conversations that delight customers beyond their high expectations:
Send only relevant messages - and allow customers to respond
Two-way conversations work especially well today because people want to be heard. Social media has ensured that we all have a voice in one way or another and that individual voices matter. In this same way, consumers have come to expect that the companies they buy from listen to their voices as well. It’s no wonder your customers and consumers on the whole crave something more personal from brands. People want a space where they can express their opinions, or even better, they want to talk to a person who can help.
Broadcasting an irrelevant message and not giving your customers a real opportunity to reply to you are two critical mistakes that could cost you valuable business.
Relevant messaging is essential in today’s busy word where inboxes and phones can be sources of noise. Deliver messages that are relevant to your customers, and you will be able to strengthen those relationships. Deliver messaging that doesn’t resonate and you could annoy your customers, or worse, lose them altogether.
Keep it personal
Studies show that customers want to have real human interactions rather than chat to bots. In fact, 90 percent of consumers say they’d prefer to talk to a real person to answer their questions. Providing text messaging for customer support is a great way to add personalization with your support interactions while still maintaining a relaxed and informal atmosphere.
Texting allows your team to give customers the personalization they want and deal with multiple cases at one time. This isn’t to say that you can’t tap into the benefits of text messaging templates or other tools to increase efficiency, but keeping the experience personal and paying attention to the customers immediate needs are paramount.
Make it easy
Texting is by far the easiest means of communication for customer support. Why? Seventy-four percent of customers say they’d stop working with a company that’s hard to do business with. That may include long wait times or email delays, or it may just include overall inconvenient customer service.
Today, when 73 percent of customers say they try to skip the automated phone bot, many times pressing “0” to speak with a real person, we can do better to make the support experience smoother. The lesson is to make it as simple and pain-free as possible, and deploying text messaging for your support team is a great way to meet your customers where they already are and in a way in which they already prefer to communicate.
Listen
It’s essential to actually listen when a customer is expressing their frustrations or needs help. But just as important as physically listening is tracking the history of your conversations in a way that’s easy to access and provides thorough information on the customer’s history.
Historical listening in this sense provides a more streamlined conversation. And the more streamlined the conversation — in other words, the less the customer has to repeat herself — the more helpful the conversation can be.
