12 Ways of Maintaining Good Customer Communication
No matter how good your website is, even if it drives leads and sales, without good customer communication, something will always be missing. And it’s this missing something that could cause your company to struggle to retain loyal customers, even if you are winning new ones.
In this article, our customer service pros have come together to help you deliver good customer communication that’ll keep both new and existing customers satisfied. We’ll explore tried-and-tested ways to boost your customer service, both DIY style and by using alldayPA’s fabulous services. We’ll focus on:
- Marketing campaigns
- Customer interaction
- Customer journey mapping
- Team organisation
- Customer service tools
12 Tips for Maintaining Good Customer Communication
Good customer communication is vital to any business looking to grow – with obvious perks being improved customer retention and a boost in your brand’s reputation
Your ability to provide top-notch customer service can be made simpler via an outsourced call centre, and we at alldayPA are more than happy to field any questions you have to get started.
But first, here are 12 tips to achieve good customer communication:
1. Ensure effective communication between marketing and sales teams
You need to make sure that you align your marketing and sales teams to not only attract and convert leads, but also for customer retention. At every stage of communication with your potential or existing customer base, sales and marketing departments should go hand in hand.
In order to coordinate, first revisit the customer journey. When both of these teams have a shared vision of what happens to customers during each stage of the sales funnel, it’s much easier for them to create a single customer experience that adds value.
Additionally, make sure you never underestimate the value of customer feedback. Since it will be the salespeople who do most of the customer communication management, there needs to be a shared way that marketers can find the information on potential customers’ issues in real time.
Essentially, when the sales and marketing teams communicate effectively and are aligned, your customers will move through the ‘sales funnel’ more smoothly.
2. Invest in 24/7 customer service
Customers need to know that you have their back, whenever they require your services. Good customer communication relies on prompt, understanding responses – no matter the time or date your customer gets in touch.
Ultimately, leaving your customer waiting for days on a response only ensures that they’ll leave your business behind. Therefore, why don’t you consider investing in 24/7 customer service?
Companies such as alldayPA offer streamlined, 24/7 customer service solutions for your business. When you’re not able to respond, they will. Calls, emails, Instagram direct messages and Facebook enquiries, even a live chat message on your website – every question or query can be answered in an instant.
Customers will grow to have faith in your business’s reliability thanks to your active responses, placing more products in their basket every time they shop with you! It helps to have considerate and friendly 24/7 customer service for the lasting, positive impression of your business, too.
3. Make transparency a priority
With so many companies having switched to remote or hybrid work, it’s not as easy to share new updates or news. In order to keep both your customers and staff up to date with what’s happening, make sure that information is always shared on whatever chat software or communication channel that your marketing and sales teams both have access to.
High-functioning teams are built on a foundation of transparency. Each team member should have full access to the project management tool that is used for all types of projects. Having access to what others are doing and being able to track their progress reduces the need for additional communication and motivates everyone to work.
When it comes to remote work especially, overcommunication doesn’t exist – particularly when trying to gain loyal customers. Use shared documents and encourage outbound communication to make sure that everyone is on the same page before a new marketing campaign is started.
4. Make use of built-in integrations
In the same way that your marketing and sales teams work better when they’re aligned, your marketing tools do too.
Integrations make it easy for you to bring the data of different marketing software together. Marketing tools usually allow integrations with tools that can become a great extension to their features and deliver a more exceptional experience. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to what integrations the entire company offers when selecting a task management tool.
There are several benefits of integrated marketing communications, mostly having to do with how customers perceive and understand your company or brand’s message.
Consistent messaging is less confusing to customers, which is why lots of brands pick simple taglines to use in their print ads, social media campaigns and advertisements. A clear, reinforced message is so much more effective than several different messages. During every marketing campaign, brands need to decide what their advertising is going to focus on so that their customers can clearly understand what they’re trying to communicate.
5. Take advantage of automation and outsourcing!
The more physical effort your customer management strategy requires, the more reliable you’ll be on your customer service team’s ability. With the help of integrations, you can optimise the vast majority of marketing processes.
Automate
When setting up automation, remember to always take into account your customer behaviour, the data on interactions they have with you across different marketing channels, and the data that you have from previous campaigns. By using these behavioural inputs, you’ll be able to set up a flow that fully meets the needs of your customers.
Essentially, when you’re thinking about matters relating to the concept of customer service, it’s always a good idea to put yourself in the shoes of a frustrated customer.
It goes without saying that slow response times is one the biggest challenges in customer messaging. There are two main mannerisms that customer service teams might adopt when addressing frustrated customers that have been waiting: active listening and positive language.
Outsource
Here, using a virtual receptionist to answer frequent customer queries can prove indispensable.
Our receptionists are trained to handle all manners of customers, turning frustrations into feedback opportunities and resolving their issues promptly. This service also shortens wait times significantly, thereby helping to keep your clients content.
We’ll be on hand to answer calls around the clock, including a remote switchboard, call triaging and more. By outsourcing to trusted customer service specialists like alldayPA, your team wins the time back to focus on other tasks.
6. Make sure customer messages are directed to the right person
As an employee, you may be receiving specific customer enquiries that you’re not quite equipped to deal with. Sorting out the messages in your inbox, unfortunately, won’t help with this dilemma! But, there’s something that can.
Another organisational tool you should be paying attention to is the alldayPA answering service – this service involves taking messages from clients and callers, ensuring every message is directed to the right, knowledgeable person.
Rest assured, your customer will be pleased, knowing they’ve been sent to an employee who’s an expert in their area of enquiry.
7. Sort messages in your inbox
As we’ve already covered, good customer communication is the central part of any effective customer service strategy. It’s the best way to learn what your target audience is most interested in and add a personal touch to your communications with them. To avoid missing these important conversations and to increase resolution times, you need to make sure that your inbox is as organised as possible.
One idea is to filter incoming emails based on the types of submissions.
Are you interested in keeping track of leads that are filling in the contact form on the blog section or speaking to people who reach out to you after visiting the landing page? It’s likely that these audiences will have different intent, so it’s important to assign different tags to emails coming from one or another audience type.
8. Use a business communication app
Speaking of transparency, it’s a good idea to create a business communication platform chat where alerts about things like new leads and sales opportunities are created and sent to everyone automatically.
Manually checking each marketing tool takes ages, so why not make the most of a business messaging app to display the status of leads and prospects directly?
Team collaboration apps keep employees in the loop with what is going on and make it easier to focus on their job roles. Messages can be sent to individual employees or in a group to ensure that everyone stays on track and performs their duties on time. Business messaging apps often come with video chat capabilities to make meetings more interactive and engaging.
9. Build dashboards
Checking each tool to collect statistics on different marketing projects just ends up a waste of time. Instead, use Google Sheets or Excel to create a complete customer management dashboard.
A dashboard that can be easily customised according to your requirement is a good one. The biggest advantage of using dashboards over more traditional spreadsheets is that they’re almost infinitely customisable and flexible.
If you’re still using the old traditional approaches of analytics reports and forwarding them to professionals and waiting for a response then you have an issue.
Real-time monitoring is also necessary to make quick decisions and form long-lasting relationships.
10. Make use of a task management tool
Integrate your custom-built CRM solution with a task management platform to avoid wasting time assigning tasks manually. This additional step is needed to ensure everyone is on the same page regardless of whether you had the time to sync with other team members or not.
Use this simple integration to send automated text alerts when new submissions are coming in, follow-ups are needed or milestones are met, for example.
Productivity improvement will also lead to increased efficiency with handling customer enquiries. This means you will be able to focus on response time and customer loyalty. The main reason why so many businesses choose to use task management tools is because, without them, many see an increase in stress, which overall has a negative impact on customer experience.
As well as this, task management tools allow you and your company to easily assess and analyse statistics to determine what works and what areas might need attention.
Once you’re aware of the key metrics and the trends, you will be able to develop a business strategy that offers the highest level of engagement and results in satisfied employees and customers.
11. Document the entire setup
Let’s face it, you have a lot of things to do. From marketing automation to tracking set up, your efforts make no sense unless your whole team knows how to use it all. Because of this, every business needs some kind of internal knowledge base. Shared Google Drives are most popular for these.
After you’ve built a customer management strategy, document it in the internal knowledgeable base. This way, you’ll be able to ensure that everyone understands their role in the process and knows how and where they can access the information they need.
Customer success journey maps sum up the entire customer success process in one document and show which parties in the company are responsible for different tasks throughout the larger customer journey. Customer success journey maps answer a lot of questions that your customer service reps will have during the course of their relationship with customers.
12. Specify a person who is responsible for coordinating the process
Although they’re a great start, activating marketing automations and building a customer management strategy aren’t enough. Ideally, someone needs to be able to continuously revisit the processes that have been set up, keep track of the data, and make sure that the business is moving in the right direction.
We understand that not every business is ready to start using a CRM. It requires a lot of organisational change and commitment from management and employees.
So, you can choose to do this DIY style or you can get in touch with alldayPA. As an outsourced call centre, we are all about helping businesses boost customer communication through our fantastic suite of services.
Let us show you how…
Choose alldayPA for unmatched customer communication
As a Manchester-based, on-demand customer service company, alldayPA provides a solution to your customer communication woes. Managing customer communication can be difficult alone, but we operate 24/7 365 days a year!
Handling calls, emails, live chats, social media, and more – alldayPA do it all, so your customers always have someone to talk to when support is needed. From catering businesses to real estate agents, we cover a range of industries and sectors, such is the great scope of our customer-serving expertise.
Say goodbye to the great cost of hiring internal customer service reps! alldayPA is the cost-effective, communicative solution your business has always needed.
For your convenience, we have a variety of outsourced customer service packages that include both CRM integration and diary management, so that you can perfect the way your organisation handles and manages customers.
For example, take note of the following packages we provide, here:
Telephone answering package
Our telephone answering package is catered to smaller businesses and startups that commonly receive a high volume of inbound calls.
We also have a starter package available, that allows you to pay as you go – perfect for startups whose requirements are always changing! This package includes telephone answering and call forwarding.
Virtual reception package
Have you considered hiring a receptionist, but aren’t sure if you can afford to hire a new team member?
Then this could be the right solution for you.
The virtual receptionist package is designed for businesses that have a large number of calls to deal with and would like to take the next step towards improving and growing their company.
This package includes telephone answering, call forwarding, remote switchboard services, call triaging, on-hold and incoming messages and diary management.
Outsourced call centre package
Our outsourced call centre package is our ultimate and most comprehensive package we can provide. It gives our clients all the perks that an in-house customer service team would deliver, without the hefty cost.
Our experienced teams take care of all your interactions that come through via various digital channels, as well as over the phone. This is perfect if your business has several communication channels to monitor.
This package includes telephone answering, call forwarding, remote switchboard services, call triaging, on-hold messages, diary management, CRM integration, email management, live chat management and social media management.
Never miss a call again with alldayPA!
Partner with our experienced call handlers for exceptional customer service and the highest level of professionalism. Never miss a call again – contact our fabulous customer service reps today to find out how we can help you. We practice what we preach, meaning that our phone lines are open all day, everyday, 24/7.
Whether you are an existing client or just taking the first steps towards growing your business with us, we are always more than happy to answer any questions or queries you might have so that you can make the most well-informed decision for you.