5 Ways Customer Interaction Improves Your Business In 2022

The year is 2022, and brands cannot afford to lose customers amidst a global recession. Businesses across the world took a significant hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, businesses also learned how to empathize and personalize with their customers in these trying times and leverage it for improving their business. To understand the best approach to interact with your customers, it is best for contact centers to conduct surveys with the existing ones and analyze the data. Learning how your customers perceive your brand, what they expect from you, and what you have been offering can give valuable insight.

As customer demands have changed as well, keeping up with the pace is important for contact centers. Sticking to yesteryear methods will never bring results to fruition. Adapting to new social culture, providing valuable information, optimizing your IVR, and training your agents in the new circumstances is a good start for contact centers to generate happy customers in 2022.

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1. Brand Perception:

Understanding your brand’s perception value is important for every business. A well-defined customer satisfaction survey helps identify the perception value that a customer attaches with your brand and if they would refer your business to a friend. It also exposes to the contact center, the  shortcomings a customer finds in their product or service of the business. Often times these shortcomings may not have been noticed by a business on their own. One of the easiest ways to ensure that your customers are satisfied is to interact with them at regular intervals. So, customer interactions help in the understanding of a customer’s mindset and thereby leading the way for business improvement. 

2. Training Methods are Improved:

Customer Interactions are great for the improvement of the overall training methods of the company for enhanced customer experience. The interaction with the customers is recorded which are later studied and analyzed. Based on this, the company formulates the training methods for new or existing customer service representatives to deliver improved service to the customers in the future. So, customer interactions help improvise the training methods and enable contact center softwares contribute to improving the business outcome. 

3. Retention of Customers is Improved:

When you frequently interact with your customers, the chance of retaining the customer increases. Frequent customer interactions make sure that you have the top of the mind share of your customers. You also know what the customers are thinking about your business and their future plans. Based on these interactions with the customers, it becomes easier for you as a business owner to retain the customers since you very well know what would make them stay. And by doing so, you not only improve customer retention percentage but also create a positive impact on your business.

4. Increased Business Volume:

Regular interaction and follow-ups with the customer increases their satisfaction levels. And a satisfied customer will not just buy repeatedly from you. Another study by Oracle shows that three out of four people have spent more with a company because of a history of positive experiences. These are points enough to prove that positive interactions with customers have the history of improving a business’s volume.

5. Coming up with Something New:

We have all heard the idiom – change is the only constant. That is true for businesses as well, in order to keep pace with the changing needs of the market, contact centers need to ensure the business launches new products or add new services or add new channels to reach out to more people. Customer interactions play a quite vital role in letting your business to come up with something new for your customers. When you interact with your customers, your contact centers can understand their needs related to your product or service. This may lead to new features/functionality that has not been thought of or not given significant priority. It might even be a new product or service that you launch by learning from the customer interactions. As per Google, 61% of people expect brands to tailor experiences based on their preferences

i) Genuinity:
There is no better way to woo your customer than showing genuinity every time you interact with them and the best way of showing genuinity is being prompt in your service. Be ready with the information your customer wants before they get the chance to ask for it.With the omnichannel contact centers' customer experience tools available today, it is possible with some of the leading players in the Customer Experience industry. 

ii) Consistency:
Be consistent in what you say to the customers and how you say it. The tonality of customer service representatives irrespective of the channel they support should resonate with the tone of the brand in order to provide a continuous brand experience. Consistency should be maintained in not just the tonality but also resolution. It is often seen that an agent servicing a customer on one channel does not know the resolution; another agent handling a different channel has offered the same customer. This often leaves a customer confused and more helpless than they were before they reached out to the company. Channel integration therefore is absolutely important for businesses to drive consistency.

iii) Promptness:
Prompt response on customer messages is the next big thing that a business should aim to do. Whether it is on social channels or calling back to the abandoned calls, promptness ensures that businesses get to the core of a customer’s issue before they lose patience and share their negative feedback with others. As shown by a report from Conversocial - 37% of consumers who use social media to complain or question brands expect to get a response in under 30 minutes. Social readiness is an essential factor in improving your customer support quality. 

iv) Social Connect:
Social platforms have emerged as one of the strongest mediums for customers to research, share and review companies and their experience. It is important for businesses today to integrate social platform into their customer service delivery channels. Here are some fact supporting this claim - Over half (51%) of respondents in a study done by Conversocial said they were 'very likely' and 41% said they were 'somewhat likely' to become a repeat customer to a brand that answers their question on social media.

Conclusion

With the value of customer interaction and the ways through which contact centers can improve those interaction, we hope we could reinforce the importance of customer engagement for your business. Applying the above points will definitely lead to positive customer experience and business growth.
If you wish to take a fresh look at where you stand in terms of customer experience delivery, the channels you support, the training to your support team to be consistent across channels and the technology you use to deliver experiences to your customer, we can help you.