7 Ways to Make Every Interaction With Customers Fantastic

Your customers have high expectations — and if your business can't meet them, they're going to leave you for your competitors.

If that sounds harsh, well, it is. In addition to getting a product or service that works for them, they want to buy from companies that make it easy to get help when they need it, that go above and beyond for them, and that make them proud to support their corporate culture and philosophy.

You already know that the customer experience doesn't end with a sale — it's an ongoing work in progress that companies should be constantly seeking to improve and iterate on. To get you started, here are our suggestions for how you can make your customers love interacting with your business.

There are plenty of reasons why customers interact with businesses — not to mention the plethora of channels they use, too. In fact, the image below shows us five general examples that can be applied to most customer experiences.

Image Source

Overall, there are three main reasons why customers interact with a business: marketing, sales, and customer service. In each of these, customers have different needs, goals, and expectations from your brand, but that doesn't make one reason more important than another. All of these reasons are important opportunities for your brand to acquire, convert, and delight your customers.

Let's look at some examples of customer interactions, categorized by marketing, sales, and customer service.

Examples of Customer Interactions

Customer Interactions in Marketing

• A customer sees an advertisement for your brand on social media and comments on it.
• A customer goes into your store and asks about the features of a specific product or service.
• A customer signs up for your email newsletter to receive weekly updates and promotions.
• A customer goes to one of your company events.

销售中的客户互动

• A customer calls your support line and asks to speak with a sales representative.
• A customer is surfing your website and decides to open a live chat conversation with a sales representative.
• A customer receives an email from your sales team and schedules a meeting.
• A sales representative calls a customer to see how they are liking their new product or service.
• A sales representative emails a customer to follow up on a conversation that had earlier.

Customer Interactions in Customer Service

• A customer calls a support line to get help with a product or service.
• 客户对产品，服务或营销促销有疑问，并在社交媒体上与您的品牌联系。
• A customer who's upset with their customer experience writes a negative review of your brand.
• A customer success manager reaches out to a customer who's showing signs of churn.

Before we move on, it's important to note the channels that customers can use to interact with your business. While new channels seem to be created every day, here are some of the most popular ones.

• Email
• 电话
• 即时聊天
• Social Media
• 网页
• Live Video
• 亲自
• Snail Mail

Now, let's look at how you can make every customer interaction memorable with these handy tips.

How to Make Every Interaction with Customers the Best it Can Be: 7 Tips

1. Show empathy and gratitude.

Are you familiar with the golden rule? "Treat others as you want to be treated."

The customer service golden rule should be "Treat customers as you want to be treated as a customer." (I know it's not as catchy, but I'm making a point here.)

我们已经写了关于移情的重要性customer-facing role a few times before, and it deserves to be underscored again here.

It might sound simple, but making sure each and every one of your customer interactions demonstrates your empathy for your customers' struggles, and your gratitude for their loyalty, goes a long way. Here are some ways to do that:

• Thank your customers — for everything. Thank them for their patience if your company experiences an outage or disruption in service. Thank them for understanding if you or your company makes an error. Thank them for their loyalty when they renew or buy again. Thank them for taking the time to share their feedback, whether it's good or bad.
• Be empathic in your responses to customer complaints and issues. Say "I'm sorry" for whatever the issue is impacting in their day-to-day. The issue could be losing them time or money, or just causing a tremendous headache. You don't always know what's going on in your customers' daily lives, so err on the side of apologetic if they come to you with an issue — great or small.

客户更有可能花费更多的阿来al, longer, if they have a history of positive experiences with your company. Do your part to make each sign-off positive and gracious to make your customers feel good about working with you.

2. Be conscientious.

This is a lesson you may have learned when you were a student, or in your first job, and it's important in your customer-facing job, too.

It's of utmost importance to be conscientious, and to responsibly follow-up to every customer communication you engage in with a solution, a forum for feedback, or helpful educational resources they can benefit from.

Whether you're connecting with customers on the phones, via email, or by commenting on social media, your customers might think that reaching out won't solve their problem (because — let's face it — it can feel like that's often the case when it comes to contacting customer service). Here are a few ways you can prove them wrong:

• If you can't solve a customer's problem with them in the first interaction, provide them with an exact and reasonable timeframe within which they can expect a resolution. Set a clear time and date, and put the responsibility on your plate to follow up.
• If your customer runs into an issue that you resolve, follow up with them a week or two later to make sure they aren't still running into the same issue.
• Better yet, do research to investigate when your customers typically encounter issues with your product, and reach out proactively with educational communications to try to prevent that friction in the first place.
• 如果你在一个持续的机智的关系h a group of customers, take the time to learn more about them and their business, and reach out from time to time with information about their industry, or congratulations about a milestone.

3. Be transparent and communicative.

It's extremely important to be transparent when you communicate with your customers — especially if it's about a mistake or error caused by you or your product.

使用您的同理心和感激肌肉，请随时解释情况，为问题道歉，并传达其发生的方式 - 以及它将如何再次发生。如果可能再次发生，请清楚地了解您的客户可以为未来做准备。

Particularly if your product or service concerns customers' personal data or information, or if your product serves as a system of record for a customer's own business, you need to take your responsibility to your customers seriously. In today's era of data breaches and credit card hacking, customers want to understand what you're doing to fix problems and prevent them from happening again. Make sure you're prepared with transparent customer communications during times like these — and if you're not, ask your team manager or director for better guidance.

4. Ask for and act on customer feedback.

You can't just give the term "valued customer" lip service — you need to walk the walk by regularly asking for and acting on customer feedback.

Regularly asking customers for feedback via surveys is an effective way to identify potential problemsbeforethey cause your customers to churn. Surveys also provide customers with an avenue to voice their thoughts on your product or your customer service in a way that makes them truly feel valued, and their specific feedback on 1:1 interactions with employees gives you the opportunity to better hone your processes — or to shout out employees going above and beyond.

Your company may already have a process in place for regularly soliciting feedback, in which case you don't want to inundate your customers with even more communications that could lead to survey fatigue.

If your company already has asking for feedback down pat, make sure you're soliciting feedback in your 1:1 conversations with customers. Even if it's not official or on the record, qualitative feedback will help you improve your service, and customers will appreciate the opportunity to be honest and share their views. And if your team isn't already deploying post-callNet Promoter Score®surveys, it can be a helpful way to develop your skills and share learnings with the greater team.

5.尽可能满意您的客户。

We're big advocates ofdelighting your customers, and a big element of delight is the surprise element.

Make sure to take time periodically to surprise your customers. You don't necessarily need to surprise them with a gift or a discount (although those can definitely be nice). Sometimes, something as simple as athank you letter, company swag, or a shoutout on social media can go a long way towards building goodwill and an emotional connection with your customers. And anemotional connectioncan sometimes be a bigger predictor of loyalty than responses to customer satisfaction surveys.

6. Go where your customers are.

作为一个客户，没有什么比当我将Twitter DM发送给公司抱怨某事的时候更让我感到烦恼了，他们回答了一个我可以打电话给我表达我的担忧的电话。bob全站app我已经经历了处理该产品问题的摩擦 - 我也不必等待暂停就可以听取客户支持代表的消息。

It's your job to make it as easy and painless as possible for your customers to get the answers they need to use your product or service. To do that, you should have a plan in place for providing service across a variety of channels where your customers typically reach out to you.

Strive to always respond to customer requests and issues on the same platform where they originally reached out. There are always exceptions to this — sometimes, you just have to talk out an issue or hop on a video call — but you should make every effort to keep communications on the same platform where your customer originally asked you for help. This helps you engage with customers faster to get them the answer they need.

7.像人一样说话。

Our final suggestion to make your customers love reaching out to you — even in cases of problems — is to talk like a human.

Your customers aren't looking for scripted corporate-speak when they call or write to you in need of assistance. Particularly if you're communicating with customers on social media, scripted, formal language can ring hollow and insincere.

If you're in the middle of solving a customer issue, feel free to keep language professional. But once you've solved a customer's problem, or if a customer is reaching out to share positive feedback, feel free to be less scripted, and more yourself.

Use good judgment to communicate with customers authentically in your own voice. For example, if customers are reaching out to you on Twitter, don't be shy about responding back to them with a GIF or a hashtag. If you're leaving them a comment on Instagram, try to work in an emoji. Little personal touches can endear you to your customers and make them more excited to connect with you.

To learn more about effective communication, read abouthow chatbots can improve user experiencenext.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.