Meet the demands of pickier, less loyal consumers
Discover how CCM can help your businesses deliver market-leading CX
The Internet has transformed customer experience. On the plus side, it has provided consumers with more choice and easier access to information than ever before, which in turn helps them be better informed about the options available to them. However, at the same time consumers, armed with this deeper insight and wider range of choice, have consequently become pickier and less loyal.
Combined, these factors can make winning and retaining customers’ loyalty seem an almost impossible task. But by focusing on improving the quality of their customer communication, businesses can make themselves more competitive and profitable.
Focusing on the following five areas will help your business master the art of customer communication and build customer loyalty:
By 2020 over half of the workforce will have been born after 1980, according to PwC research. Having grown up with digital technology and social media, millennials have different communication habits than other groups. They are heavy mobile users and are more likely to prefer communicating with brands through social networks than other age groups. Meanwhile, they expect to be able to sign up for services online and anticipate instant responses to any issues or questions they have. To meet these high expectations businesses must ensure their customer communications are designed to be mobile-enabled, agile and support multi-channel conversations.
Responsibility for customer communication has traditionally fallen with operations and IT, but this is increasingly shifting to business and marketing departments. Empowering these users will enable the organisation to make changes faster and gain better control of the brand, tone and messaging on documents. This ensures a more relevant and consistent communication experience for customers, which in turn increases loyalty and retention.
Every email, social interaction or chat message is an opportunity to add value or increase customers’ loyalty towards your brand, so it’s vital to optimise every conversation. Failing to provide every interaction with the appropriate level of attention, personalisation and enthusiasm could have dire consequences, from a customer leaving, to outing your poor customer experience on social media, which threatens even further damage to your brand reputation.
Businesses have to be more aware of the need for a consistent brand experience across digital and physical channels. Customer communication teams are often in distributed locations, which can cause challenges from a management perspective. This can result in conflicting messages being sent to customers, as well as information about their preferred communication channel and last interaction with the brand not being shared across the business. To avoid inflicting this negative effect on the customer relationship businesses must ensure that data is collated across channels to provide a single brand experience regardless of a customer’s buying journey.
Any customer communication project must have rules and processes in place to ensure they’re compliant with regulations and meet internal stakeholder demands. Technology has a role to play by helping businesses set up templates, prevent unauthorised editing of documents, logos, images and signatures. But so too does implementing workflows to control and audit all inbound and outbound communication, as well as operational procedures that specify ownership and authority.
By considering the key market trends, business targets and customers’ individual needs and preferences, businesses can begin drawing up a communications strategy that transforms the quality of customer experiences.
Modernising the processes and technology behind customer communication enables businesses to address their audience in more swift, relevant and personalised ways according to customers’ channels of choice. This will enhance the appeal of the brand to the modern consumer while increasing loyalty and retention.
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