We’ve recently discussed the importance of communication and customer service and how it can be a key for success in any business. For this upcoming year, you want to ensure you’re prepared to take your business to the next level of success by providing excellent experiences and more convenience for your customers. 80% of customers believe the experience a business provides is as important as its services, and 67% are willing to pay more for a great experience. With this in mind, and with the world of customer communication and technology constantly evolving, it’s essential for your business to stay ahead of the industry with these 5 trends for 2021. In our industry, it’s no surprise that preparing ahead of time results in beneficial outcomes. Now is the time to prepare for the upcoming year to provide the best service for your customers.
Omni-Channel Experience
In a previous article, we’ve discussed the importance of ensuring your business has a social media presence as it will help keep your business ahead of our industry. An important step to take your business to the next level of success is to provide an omni-channel experience. This experience consists of having a multi-channel approach to sales, customer support, and marketing across all social media platforms your business is on.
For example, if you’re announcing a new service or promotion for the spring, you want to be sure you spread that information across all your online platforms. If a customer gets in contact with your company through Facebook and email, you want to ensure you respond in a consistent manner or voice regardless of which online platform your customer decides to contact your company on. Also, it provides your customers with multiple options to reach out to your company for inquiries or questions instead of limiting them to only phone calls and emails. Following the omni-channel service trend will allow your business to create a seamless customer experience and gain customer satisfaction as it’s become an expectation from customers over the past years. Remember it’s vital to keep a consistent voice throughout all the platforms in order to create a consistent experience.
Customer Success
Providing good customer service alone may not ensure your customer’s loyalty. Customer service is about reacting to situations, however in order for your business to succeed for the upcoming year, it’s essential to provide your customers with value and achieve customer success. Providing customer success consists of proactively addressing potential issues for your customers before problems arise. For example, while fertilizing a customer’s lawn you may notice there’s a large amount of mosquitoes around their outdoor area. Realizing this issue allows you to offer a mosquito solution service for their home and solves a problem before it arises. Even if your customer decides to not accept the offer, they will acknowledge your business for taking the extra step of being proactive and offering them a solution ahead of time. This is a key in ensuring customer success, which in return will help you boost customer happiness and retention.
Personalization
With people spending more time at home and online, now is an important time to prioritize personalizing your emails for the upcoming year. As we mentioned previously, ensuring your customers have a good experience with your business is important. 70% of customers are disappointed when they receive an impersonal experience, due to personalization becoming an expectation rather than an option. Think about the last time you opened an email from a company offering you promotions that were unnecessary to you or your needs. When the promotions are beneficial or helpful, it’s a more meaningful experience and can make a big difference when deciding to purchase that product, or service. Essentially, taking that extra step in personalizing your email for your customers will ensure a good experience and help develop a solid relationship. It will show your business considers each of your customers unique and understands their needs. This ultimately will result in improving retention rates, and increase your sales as 80% of customers are more likely to purchase services when receiving personalized experiences.
Ensuring your sending personalized emails to the right customer, with the right message, at the right time will take your business to the next level of success. We understand it can be a challenge creating efficient personalized emails. Take a look at our 3 tips to help you with email personalization and improve your marketing automation!
Chatbots
Your next potential customer may not be available during the regular 9-5 pattern, and may need a question answered later in the evening. They also might need to address a problem on their own and receive a quick response about your services or business. In order to provide this form of self-service for your customers, consider adding an automated chatbot to your website.
Companies that use chatbots are 60% more likely to see improvement in resolution times and 30% improvement in customer satisfaction. Chatbots will increase your website’s efficiency as it provides a way to instantly assist your customers around the clock. Providing your customers with this extremely useful option will also create a great customer experience as more and more people want quick results when searching for the service they need. It’s essential and beneficial for your business to add this self-service for the upcoming year. Here are a few more ways an automated chatbot can improve your business:
- They reduce pressure on customer service staff by handling simple customer problems
- They are great for lead generation, helping the sales team successfully convert more potential customers
- They are great for collecting customer data that can be analyzed to gain valuable insights into your customers
- Increased customer engagement. You are always available to engage with the customer.
- Long- term cost savings for the company
Keep your business ahead of the competitors by elevating customer experiences and providing your customers with this extremely helpful, around the clock, self-service.
Transparency
Maintaining transparency and building trust with your customers is more important now than ever. In our world today, misinformation is easily widespread. This means your customers are not only looking for a great service, but a trustworthy one as well. If your current customers feel your business is untrustworthy, they will decide to purchase a service from your competitor as honesty has become an expectation for any business throughout the years. Ensuring your business is transparent with your customers is a key way of creating trust and will help eliminate any type of doubts they might have about the value of what your service offers. To help maintain transparency for your business, take a look at the following tips:
- Tell your customers exactly what they’re getting, and what their total cost will be, if it may cost more because of unforeseen issues, let them know that maybe the case. You can provide them with a bullet point list of what the service they requested specifically provides, with the exact costs. Having hidden costs will only result in your customers turning away and switching to your competitors.
- As previously mentioned, it’s important to be available for your customers whenever they have questions about your business, services, or any issues. A small mishap can grow into a big problem, so responding quickly and being available is a must.
- Admitting to any possible mistakes is important, along with following up with promises to correct them.
- Keep your customers in the loop by communicating with them about any changes in your business such as a new service or product coming soon, a change in your hours of operation, price changes for your services, etc. Well-timed, engaged communication about any changes is a must to keep consistent clarity with your customers.
Your customers will value honesty and transparency more now than ever before. Therefore, it should be a priority for any business in the upcoming year. Maintaining a consistent transparency will result in higher customer retention, along with positive experiences.
Finally
Rely on Central to help, whether it’s questions about marketing strategy, or business planning. Central is the right partner for your business. We stay at the leading edge of the industry and we’re ready to help you grow!