Communication is one of the most important aspects of any business. There are many ways to maximize communication within your company. One of the most fundamental points to consider is that you need multiple channels available to suit your customers’ needs.
One of the most significant service metrics when it comes to communication is response time. Customers do not like to be left hanging on, but the more popular your services are- the more customers you will have to deal with.
You will need to manage two key areas. Firstly, the effective use of your people and resources. And, secondly the flow of communication in and out of your business.
Your customers want to contact you in the way that they feel the most comfortable. Often, this is not via telephone. With many people used to experience long waits on hold, the experience of calling a contact center is dreaded by many.
Digital communication is often favored, and increasingly, social media offers customers the ability to message at their convenience. Having a presence on all of the leading social media sites will allow your customers to interact with you wherever suits them.
You’ll need a system for collating the messages so that you can move quickly in replying.
But speedy communication works both ways. If you want to get valuable information directly to your customers in a way that allows them to act on it immediately, you may want to consider an email to SMS gateway. While many people check their emails periodically throughout the day, they are not always connected to their inbox. Phones may only be set up to check the email server for new messages every fifteen minutes or more. SMS gets straight through, meaning if the information requires immediate action, this is more likely to get taken.
It might be slightly infuriating to reach an automated telephone service. However, it is not so bad when you reach an artificial intelligence chatbot.
If you are dealing with a large number of incoming queries on services such as Facebook messenger, you won’t have the time to reply to them all straight away. But once a message is sent, a customer needs to know that it has been received and have an idea of when they will find out. Anxiety-related to waiting for a reply can cause tension within the user experience and ultimately may lose you that customer.
Having chatbots that can deal with necessary inquiries will eliminate much of the initial back-and-fore at the start of any customer interaction. It can help you prioritize tickets in a queue, and allow you to manage your customer workflow in a very effective manner.
Once all of your systems are in place, you should implement targets for response, and resolution. But too often, companies close open tickets before a satisfactory solution has been found, for customer service representatives to meet their targets. You will need to have methods in place that allow you to check the quality of the service, and the satisfaction of customers following on from using your services.
Also try to remember that communication within the teams in your business is important too. If your people are not able to communicate with one another, you should find that you are going to struggle a lot to get things done. So you need to make sure that you are setting up whatever systems you might need in order to make your business communication a lot more efficient.
One of the best ways to do this is to use apps and software that you probably already have access to. A good example is WhatsApp – it is likely that members of your team already have and use WhatsApp on a daily basis, after all. All you need to do now is to get a virtual number for WhatsApp Business so you can start communicating with one another in this manner.
Once you have internal communications like this in place, you will find that everything is so much easier and simpler, so it’s definitely something that you are going to want to think about. Then you can look into some of the other things listed above to help with your customers and clients too.
- This post has been written by an outside source – See Disclosure Policy
