Every business needs to be able to effectively communicate with its customers. However, it’s likely even more important for marketing businesses.
As a marketing business, your entire brand is built upon your communication skills. If you can’t effectively communicate with your customers, they’ll have a hard time believing you’re able to communicate with an audience on their behalf. So, it’s essential that you’re always on the lookout for ways to improve your customer communication.
When you consider that customers will stop doing business with an organization if they experience poor communication, it’s even more apparent. Below, we’ll outline a few ways you can improve customer communication within your marketing business and hopefully ensure each of your customers has a good experience with you.
Focus on the Customer
One of the most important things you can do is change your mindset about how you make business decisions. Whenever you’re making a decision for your business, think about it from the customer’s perspective. This process is known as becoming customer centric and it’s essential if you want to make communication decisions that benefit your customers.
For example, let’s say you’re looking for a new method to interact with your customers. Email would be the most cost-effective solution for your business, however, research shows that your audience prefers to communicate via social media. With a customer-centric approach, you would then decide to focus more on social media, as this is what your customers want. It may cost more, but the benefits you’ll receive from happier customers are worth it.
Collect Feedback
To learn how to best communicate with your customers, it’s often essential that you collect feedback from them. After all, how better to learn about your customers’ preferences than by asking them directly? There are several ways you can go about collecting feedback from your customers.
For instance, you could send out a survey or try to schedule interviews with a select few clients. Both have their pros and cons, so you’ll have to decide which is more beneficial for your marketing business.
If you need help collecting feedback from your customers, consider setting up a user testing platform. A user testing platform makes it easy to talk to your customers and share their feedback with the rest of your team. Collecting feedback from your audience should be an ongoing process and not a one-time event, so the investment in additional tools to help you do it is often worth the cost.
Expand Communication Options
Once you’ve gotten some feedback from your customers, you can then start exploring options to expand your communication offerings. Everyone has their own preferred method of communication so the more options you can offer, the wider audience you’ll appeal to.
For instance, some people prefer to talk on the phone, others through email, while others would prefer to contact you on social media.
Use your customer feedback to decide which avenues to expand into first. You can also use your feedback to determine which of your communication options receive the most attention.
For example, you may decide to have someone check your emails several times throughout the day but only answer social media inquiries once or twice.
To help lessen your customer inquiries, consider using a form of AI. Artificial intelligence tools can respond to common customer inquiries with pre-made responses so that your team doesn’t have to answer the same questions repeatedly.
A common example of using AI for customer communication is chatbots. Chatbots mimic having a conversation with customers right on your website, making it easy for customers to connect and get answers to common questions. You can also integrate a live chat feature with your chatbot, giving your marketing business another popular communication method.
Provide Employee Training
Finally, don’t forget about the people on your team communicating with your customers. You can optimize your tools and communication offerings all you want, but if your team isn’t at its best, your customers will still end up with a poor experience.
So, it’s important that you regularly provide your employees with communication training. Be sure they know how to use all your software tools, what sort of tone they should use in their communications, and how to efficiently move through the queue of customer requests.
A good practice is to give your employees sample interactions. You can either make these up or base them on previous interactions. Ask your team how they would handle these cases, then discuss with them the ideal method afterward. This is a good way to give your team practical experience and ensure everyone is interacting with your customers in your preferred manner.
Making Customer Communication a Priority
There’s a lot that goes into running a successful marketing business. However, customer communication should be your main priority. Strong customer communication has several benefits, including an improved brand image and higher sales.
If you’re not already focusing on how you interact with your customers, make use of the strategies above and start turning them into a priority. When the benefits start rolling in, you’ll be glad you did.
