10 ways to connect with your customers
Connecting with your customers is important, and how you go about it is important too. With any business nowadays, competition is fierce, and that is predominantly due to the fact that the internet has managed to connect us all in a way like never before. Making sure you’re doing everything you can to connect with your customers is not only important for building the relationship between the two of you but holding on to their custom. You don’t want them going over to your competition at the end of the day. Here are ten ways to connect with your customers.
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Have multiple channels of communication
As a business, you might be dealing with a wide range of customers when it comes to their demographic. Even if you’ve got a specific target audience, you always want to try and have as many forms of communication as possible. The problem that starts to arise when you limit your contact methods is that your customers will start to think you don’t want to be contacted. If you’re limiting contact methods, it’s only going to anger those customers who want to get in touch with you. Not only that, but you’re going to have difficulty when it comes to your reputation. A negative reputation is hard to pull back and make into a positive one, so you want to do everything you can to try and avoid that happening. If you’ve only got one or two forms of communication, increase it. Don’t have a phone number? Why not get a virtual line so that out of hours, your customers can still get in touch with you. Don’t have a physical business address? Get a P.O box so that you can still receive correspondence through that.
Install a chat service
A chat service can be a great way of taking advantage of technology. As much as it can be good to communicate over the phone, some people don’t like talking over the phone and prefer to email instead. However, emails can be hard to respond to when you’ve got thousands to deal with in your customer service department. A way of resolving that is through chat services that are live. It’s worth looking at how to add a chat room to your website or a live chat pop-up where you can speak to your customers directly as and when they need to. Of course, it might not be possible to operate live 24/7, but they could still leave a message, and it can be something you can pick up the following day.
A chat service is a great way of interacting with your customers on a personal level, and you can personalise it in your own way that’s unique. It’s also better than talking to an automated robot that’s just going to be frustrating for those who just want to speak to a human being.
Ask for their feedback
Feedback is always good to receive from your customers because why wouldn’t you want it? A lot of businesses can tend to shy away from it because sometimes it might be harsh or critical. However, critical feedback can be a real eye-opener into parts of your business, whatever product or service you are selling, to see what’s not working properly. By embracing that feedback, you’re improving your products or services in the right way, to suit your customer’s needs. That way, the next product or service you release, is going to be a lot better and improved. The more you can work on your customer’s feedback and put it to action, the more success and growth you’re going to get from your business.
You can ask for your customer’s feedback in a number of ways. You could send an email after a purchase or get them to review the product or service after a couple of weeks.
Make use of e-mail newsletters
Emails are a great way of interacting with your audience but to also celebrate some of your customers too. Showing your appreciation for them is important, so why not give them some exclusive content for signing up for your newsletter. It might be in the form of some freebies, or maybe it’s giving them a sneak peek at the next product that you have coming up. There are lots of ways that you can make your communications better and mainly, to make your customers feel likey they’re being talked to directly. Tailoring email newsletters and making them more personal just by greeting them by their first name can be highly beneficial.
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Create a blog
A blog can be a great way of promoting your services but also for putting in a call to action, which can be beneficial for interacting with your customers. Not only that, but it can be great for those who are just coming onto your site and perhaps want to know about you. The more you can do to improve your traffic levels online, the better. There are lots of benefits from having a blog on your website, and one of them is that you’ll likely have a better bounce rate. That means basically the percentage of your customers in ratio to how long they spend on your site. The lower it is, the more time they’re spending on your website. You can create content that your audience is going to love and engage with your customers via the comments section of your blog posts too if you choose to do so. There should be lots of different ways to communicate with your customers, and everyone is a little bit different in what they find to be their favourite form of communication too.
Be active on social media
Social media has become such a great way to speak to your customers and to understand who they are on a more personal level. Each social media platform is a little different to the next, and so it’s worth figuring out which one is going to benefit you the most and utilize your resources and skills for those particular ones. Start finding like-minded people on there and customers that you already have so that you can generate more conversations. Whether it becomes an opportunity to plug a new campaign or to become a customer service front for those who need it, social media can be a great way of reaching new customers and on a global scale.
Make your customer service better
Customer service can be something that businesses sleep on when it comes to their business. However, if you’re trying to communicate with your customers more, you need to look at how you can make your customer service better. Think about how you’re operating it right now and what needs to change. It could be the process of what to do when it comes to customer complaints or improving the response time of your emails or phone calls. The better you make your customer service, the more you’re going to improve relationships between you and your customers.
Go the extra mile
There are lots of customers that can slip through the net when it comes to holding onto their business with you. You don’t want to lose customers, but sometimes it can happen through bad customer service experience. To avoid this, always try to go the extra mile. There’s always something you can do to resolve a problem, and it’s better to help resolve it in some way, rather than simply saying nothing can be done. That’s not going to achieve anything for you as a business, and it’s only going to leave a sour taste in the mouth of your customer.
Meet customers in real life
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Your customers like to interact with you as a business, and for many of those who operate mainly online, that’s the only interaction they get. However, if there’s ever the opportunity to meet customers in real life, then it’s definitely worth doing. It could be at conference events or community events that you’ve got involved with. Try to make it possible to interact with your customers face to face.
Encourage your customers to get involved
And finally, a great way of building up your customer relationships is by allowing them to get involved with the creation and growth of your business. It might be that you’re running a campaign and therefore need some involvement from them. For example, a beauty brand might challenge its customers to create a look to be in with the chance of winning a prize bundle. It’s just one idea that you can adapt to your own business, and they will feel as though they have an active involvement with your business, even though they’re just your customers.
Connecting with your customers is important, and there’s plenty of different ways that you can make it better. Look at ways to get your customers involved with the business and improve your techniques and processes when responding to customers. It all counts towards a better relationship.
