Are your Customers Grumbling? Use These Three Tech Tips to Build a Better Relationship With Them Today

7 years ago | Posted in: Business | 1075 Views

If you work in customer service — or if you own a business — then you know how important it is to form good relationships with your customers and to make them happy.

It’s not always possible to please your customer base, but a great company will go out of its way to help the customer and to solve problems he or she is encountering with your company.

This not only helps your business and encourages brand growth and sales — but it helps you build a stronger relationship with your customers. That loyalty goes a long way as you build it over time. You’re customers are more willing to work with you when they know you’ll go out of your way to help them.

If you’re ready to build better relationships with your customers and to improve your interactions with them, then read on to get our three expert tips for using technology to reach them. You may be surprised by how easy these tips are to deploy in your own customer service strategy today:

Tip #1: Automated Email Responses

The beauty of customer service in a tech world is that you don’t have to respond to everything in realtime. Your customers, however, do want a quick response from you — and that’s why it’s important to deploy a plan for troubleshooting issues and responding.

In fact, because of the need to be responsive, 64 percent of top-performing marketing companies use automated emails that they send to the customers every week.

If you allow your customers to reach out to you via email, make sure you are responding to them with automated messaging that immediately drops into their Inbox. In your automated response, you should let them know you received their message, you’re working the issue and that they should expect to hear from you within 24 hours. A nice touch is to complete the task in less than 24 hours and surprise them.

Tip #2: Troubleshoot on Social

Some of the best customer service stories come from companies that are leveraging social media for troubleshooting issues. Consider setting up a Twitter account and encouraging your customers to reach out to you with their issues by tweeting at you. It’s one of the most popular ways for companies to interact with their social users, as indicated by Apple’s @AppleSupport Twitter feed, which won a “Gold” #Customer award recently.

Recently Twitter introduced a new mechanism for its direct messaging called a chat bot, which allows a brand to troubleshoot an issue via a chat window in a direct message.

Using Twitter in this way is a public-facing customer service approach, so you’ll want to make sure you have a team monitoring the feed and responding as soon as possible. There is nothing worse for a brand to ignore a real-time post or to be too slow to respond!

Tip #3: Demonstrate Inclusivity

As a business owner who is promoting products or services for a diverse array of people, you’ll want to ensure your ads and promotional materials are accessible to all. If you’re not making your communications with customers accessible to everyone, then you are missing out on reaching a huge population.

What’s more, you can be in violation of federal disability laws, which make providing accessible websites and other platforms for persons with disabilities a civil rights issue. There have been class action lawsuits against big companies like Netflix, for example, for not offering closed captioning services.

Show your customer base that you are thinking of everyone with diverse needs when you are producing your products and services.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, if at the end of the day all you remember is that making the customer happy in whatever small way you can — and making their lives easier as they interact with you — is key, then you’re on your way to drastically improving your current relationships with them.

Customer service is about personalization and investment. And technology can help you achieve that if you use it in an effective and intentional way. If you’re ready to see your relationships with your customers improve, then try these three top tips for leveraging tech in your interactions.

In 2017 and beyond, customer service will increasingly be focused on leveraging social media and technology to deliver your customers customized, personalized messaging that improves their lives in only the way your company can. Use technology to your advantage today!

 

By:  Jennifer Livingstom

 

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