When it comes to great customer service, clients won’t hesitate to reward your company. However, more than half of Americans have canceled a planned purchase after just one instance of bad service.
Therefore, to retain your customer base, you need to understand what exactly outstanding customer service looks like to your clients.
The first step you can take to improve your customer service team’s interactions is determining how to talk to customers most beneficially. To get started, we’ve put together the top 3 strategies on how to best talk to customers.
3 Strategies on How to Best Talk to Customers
Personalise Your Conversations
When a job applicant applies to your company, you likely look them up to learn about them. This technique of researching applies to a client who contacts you.
In 2019, 72% of consumers said they only engaged with customised marketing messages about their specific interests. In other words, a majority of customers prefer a brand that shows it knows their needs.
How can you make a more personal connection with customers?
First and foremost, performing a search on Google is the easiest way to find new information on a client. This information can come from glancing at their LinkedIn page or other sources, such as a blog.
Nonetheless, this research is only as useful as the number of team members who know and use it. Thus, to make customer conversations both personal and consistent, share client notes with your team members.
One way to easily share any piece of client information with your team can be through a shared inbox, for example.
Practice Active Listening
When you actively listen to a client you are corresponding with, you are showing them respect as well as building their trust. Essentially, you are showing the client that what they’re saying is important to you and is being heard.
However, good active listening strategies to improve how to talk to customers involve more than just hearing what they say. For example, eye contact is part of body language.
If you don’t make eye contact with a client, they may feel you aren’t being genuine with them.
Similarly, understanding the customer’s body language can help. By understanding body language, you can provide the best responses to what is asked, be it verbal or non-verbal.
Maintain a Consistent Follow-Up Schedule
When surveyed, customers reported that they’d recommend brands with a quick but inefficient response compared to slow but effective ones. What this means is customers prefer a timely response to the queries they may send your company.
Thus, taking a long time to get back to a customer’s question may leave them dissatisfied. How can you provide a customer with a timely and effective response?
To balance the timeliness of your client communications with how effective they are, streamlined internal communication is key. For example, when looking at a team that utilises a shared inbox, the benefit of email transparency becomes clear. Overall, the team is more productive and consistent in its results. Why? Thanks to the ease of access to information that a shared inbox provides, any team member can pick up where another leaves off.
With this mentality of sharing information this way, your team can keep track of customer interactions and maintain a consistent schedule of that contact.
Streamline Your Methods on How to Talk to Customers
In the end, to make the most out of any client interaction, your customer service team should be on the same page as one another. Let’s say a customer reaches out with a question, but the team member they last spoke to is on vacation.
Without an easy to use, intelligent message hub like Threads, getting back to the customer may take longer than you want. With Threads, your team can instead easily search for the information they need and find it quickly.
Thus, the customer can receive a response that is as knowledge had it come from the team member on vacation. Overall, if the communication of your customer service team is not streamlined, then client communications won’t be either.
To hear more about how Threads can help your customer service team learn how to talk to customers well, contact the team at Threads today.