The way we communicate with our customers can make all the difference. Here are four essential tips to improve how you reach out to them.
For any organisation, getting all your teams to row in the same direction when it comes to building customer relationships is pivotal for success. Many businesses will have their own strategies to achieve this. But, what’s eye-opening is that when we recently spoke to 800 B2B decision-makers across Europe about how they nurture customer and client relationships, there was a clear top response: ensure better communication.
The key word here is ‘better’ – not ‘more‘. Year on year, studies show that we’re all communicating increasingly, but it’s having less and less impact.
We also asked our decision-makers to compare the value of strong communication to other business factors. It topped them – with 72% agreeing that better rapport is more important than price and capabilities.
It’s clear that customer relationships hold great value, and businesses everywhere (no matter their size or structure) need to make sure they’re forging quality connections at every touchpoint.
Where do we start?
For Gamma, relationships are at the heart of our success. The following are our top four insights into helping you nurture better customer communications – and the tangible solutions you can put in place to make them happen.
1. Make it on their terms
In our overloaded modern lives, quantity of communication has increased, but quality is declining. It makes sense then that we should be reducing the demands we make of customers, rather than increasing them.
It’s time to start thinking from your customers’ perspective and work backwards from what they want to achieve. Your customers know their destination, their preferred outcome, they just don’t know how to get there. That’s when a great customer experience can step in.
So, when the customer needs support and someone to talk to, be there at the right time with the right information on the right channel – and that’s their platform of choice, giving them the most confidence and convenience. An opti-channel approach can make sure how you connect with your customers is exactly the way they want it.
It’s also likely a customer journey won’t end on the channel it began, so it’s essential to have a single customer view. For example, an agent picking up a customer issue that has already progressed along the chain needs to be able to see all the information from previous conversations, so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves.
You can find more information on this in our guide to epic CX. Download it here.
2. Feeling is believing
Emotional value is central to all relationships, even in work. Research shows that how you make customers or partners feel when you communicate with them is every bit as important as what you can do for them.
Customers are people, not datapoints. When reaching out to them, it’s vital to understand their human needs (including their preferred mediums) and perspectives. Not only will you maximise your chance of developing a strong long-term relationship, but you’re also safeguarding your business reputation.
CX is key here. How a customer service agent connects with a customer can affect their emotional response. This kind of empathy is real skillset, but it can have a heavy toll on agents who are dealing with multiple customers a day. This is where technology can help – surfacing information about the customer fast to help the agent with AI-driven insights and prompts allowing them to give the best response to the situation.
Put simply, the quality of experience you provide directly influences how the customer feels. Keep your customers happy and your business will almost certainly be in a happier place too.
3. Stay true to your word
Relationships are made or broken through trust. One recent study from the Europe Business School found that “Trust is the Holy Grail, its importance is 11 out of 10”.
From the very first contact, it’s important to be honest and never promise anything that you’re not sure can be delivered. You also need to know your business values inside and out. Long-term relationships thrive on consistency, and what a customer gets when they choose you and your business should perfectly mirror what you’ve told them beforehand.
An authentic connection is a more trusted connection. As people, we respond to authenticity – we’d all rather speak to a human over a bot, or to a business who’s more straight-talking and ditches the corporate spiel. Transparency plays a big role in what makes a business authentic, so every connection needs to feel as real and open as possible.
4. Unify your voice
Remember that when you’re communicating with someone outside your organisation – customer or partner – they may also be hearing other voices from other departments too. If your teams’ voices don’t align, it raises questions. To solve this, it all comes back to collaboration.
Collaboration is fundamental for businesses for a variety of reasons – not least for increased productivity, innovation, efficiency, problem solving… the list goes on. However, collaboration doesn’t just have internal benefits. When each team and department is on the same page, working towards a shared goal and, crucially, communicating with customers with the same voice, values and message, a more consistent and trusted connection is achieved.
Unified communications can help your teams collaborate better – strengthening your external communications. If you’d like to learn more about this, read our blog here.
How Gamma can help
The best-practice insights and tips we’ve just explored can help your business elevate your customer relationships, but we believe we can go further than that.
We’re on a mission to make communication more human by helping businesses to form authentic connections through simple and intuitive experiences – because good relationships make good business sense.
For over 20 years, Gamma has been providing connectivity, voice and collaboration solutions through a portfolio of market-leading communication products and services for businesses of all sizes and structures. You can read more about them here.
Gamma Experience, for example, is our range of solutions that enable businesses to deliver best-in-class customer experiences including faster time to resolution and providing true omni-channel connections leading to happier customers overall.
Building real connections with customers is harder than ever. But with the human-centric approach we’ve outlined above, combined with the right technology and dedicated support, lasting relationships are possible. If you want to delve deeper into our thinking and our research, read our whitepaper here. Or, if you want to see how it works in a real-life environment, speak to a real agent via our website.
