No business can thrive without its customers. In many ways, acquiring new customers poses a more significant challenge than retaining existing customers. That’s why every business owner must prioritize customer satisfaction. There’s no gainsaying that maintaining healthy communication with customers is critical to increasing your business’s bottom line. On that note, here are a few tips to improve communication with customers.
Create a better work environment.
A healthy work environment serves both your employees and customers. While it optimizes the productivity of your workforce, a healthy work environment enhances customer experience and satisfaction. So, try to create a work environment that promotes communication and collaboration among employees and customers. Teach employees to personalize service delivery to enhance customer loyalty and retention. Most times, it’s the little things that make the difference. A simple smile and eye contact with customers might be all it takes to make a difference.
You can even offer customers a cup of water when they enter your premises and try to keep your office smoke-free. Allowing cigarette smoking in the office could expose customers to secondhand smoke. Just so you know, tobacco smoke has over 250 chemical compounds that pose significant health risks, including lung cancer and infection, stroke, and heart attack.
Encourage your employees who smoke tobacco products to quit smoking. Alternatively, you can introduce them to smokeless products like snuff, sticks, orbs, strips, and tablets. Smokeless tobacco use is a practice where smokers chew or suck a tobacco product. Depending on the smokeless product, they could spit or swallow. The downside to smokeless products is that they might cause nicotine addiction. What’s more, employees will have to first consult their GP before trying anything new.
You can also make provisions for chewing tobacco tins so employees who smoke can safely store their chewing tobacco products. These tins are FDA-approved and are suitable for storing edibles, flowers, mints, non-tobacco snuff, coffee pouch, and gum. The best part is that most chewing tobacco tins are odor-proof.
Set up a cloud or physical call center.
One way to improve communication with customers is to boost your customer service. Your customer service team must be well-equipped to deal with customer inquiries and queries in real-time. The easiest way to do that is to set up a call center. Today, many businesses prefer virtual call centers to on-site call centers. For example, an omni channel contact center is a contact center solution powered by artificial intelligence.
The software does more than make a phone call or send an SMS to a customer. Contact center agents can use the Omnichannel cloud contact center to provide top-notch customer service on any service channel. Customers can also connect with a live agent on social media, live chat, voice call, text messaging, SMS, and mobile app.
Recruit staff with good interpersonal skills.
Without a competent workforce, you probably won’t achieve your communication goals, regardless of the communication strategies put in place. Make sure you hire only the best candidates to fill open positions at your company. If you don’t have a strong HR team, find a reputable recruitment company specializing in your industry to handle your recruitment process.
More importantly, your hires must have good interpersonal skills that include active listening, negotiation, and dispute resolution. This is critical to effectively communicate with customers. While interpersonal skills come naturally to some, many others cultivate and develop them over time. Business owners value employees who possess interpersonal skills for their positive attitude and pleasant demeanor. In general, these employees are team players who work well with others.
Make sure you recruit employees who understand social intelligence and how to interpret signals customers send. These employees know how to switch communication tactics on the fly as the occasion demands.