The business industry is a customer-centric game. Customers’ perception defines your business value. From driving sales to affecting profit margins are directly or indirectly controlled by customers. Considering these facts, one can assume how predominant it is for businesses to focus on customer experience and satisfaction for the product, services, and marketing messages.
But unfortunately, many companies are not convinced by the idea of considering customers first.
91% of the organizations said that they aspire to be among the customer experience leaders in their industry and yet, only 37% have started any kind of formal CXM initiative.
The estimation here is that the business that didn’t adapt to CXM (Customer Experience Management), doesn’t think of customers as an important factor in the equation. Their turnabout strategy mainly involves cost-cutting efforts; management teams standardize businesses by reducing cost and reshaping internal processes to make them effective. These efforts can save money but cannot generate revenue.
Subsequently, companies must understand the necessity of prioritizing customers and effectively improve customers’ experience towards Retail CRM. Marketers also need to work on customer interaction.
Why is customer interaction important to crack?
By definition, customer interaction is exactly as it sounds; a communication or engagement between business and customers. Customer interaction allows an organization to optimize its communication with customers, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
About its importance, you ask? Every interaction you have with your customers is an opportunity to leave an impression and change their mindset. Customers’ behavior changes from time to time, depending on the market trends, lifestyles, economic circumstances, etc and, Small Business CRM are expected to roll with it. These changes may not always provide a great deal of profitability to the business but they will surely help in retaining loyal customers.
As a matter of fact, businesses do not provide value to the customers. The value of a product or a service of a company is determined by how it is used by consumers. Hence, any conversation with a customer is vital. According to a Zendesk trend survey, approximately half of customers turn to a rival after only one negative experience.
If this is not convincing enough, here are some reasons why customer interaction is important
How do companies interact with customers?
Leading customer service teams communicate with consumers through a variety of platforms, including text, chatbot, and social engagement, where these users are easily available.
While phone and email are widely prevalent, high-performing teams are more likely to connect with customers through engaging channels such as social media, customer service, live chats, various messaging apps, etc.
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What are high-performance customer experience leaders achieving through customer interactions?
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Increased customer satisfaction
As the saying goes, “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all”. Providing positive customer experiences while maintaining your organization’s image is an excellent strategy, which will also make you more resilient as a business.
You can never satisfy your customer based on guessing what they expect. Each interaction with the customer delves deep into their experience, allowing you to gather pieces of information and plan for the battleground.
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Critical for providing intuitive training to agents
While speaking with a customer service representative, you may have come across the following message that appears before the call begins: “This call is being recorded for training purposes.” What is that for?
Most companies have call recordings in their customer care centers, which is similar to chat transcripts on live chat, and these call recordings are typically used to record the customer service interactions in order to use them to train the executives. This exercise is critical for training programs as some of these interactions are used as a case study to teach trainees how to act in every use case scenario.
One of the best aspects of having an interactive clientele is that the customer on the other end can be completely honest about their feelings about the company. By allowing management to hear your ideas, they will be able to improve agents’ training.
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Create a stronger brand persona
Work with a team that is adamant about bringing about change and improving customer satisfaction through customer interaction. There will be a reduction in the number of dissatisfied customers to deal with and an increase in happy and satisfied customers.
And, at the end of the day, what more does a company need than for its customers to spread the word about how fantastic it is in the market?
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They offer data points that can be useful in enhancing internal operations
Operational processes begin to change when companies are eager to learn from customer reviews and their customer service team. All of the healthy skills picked up from customer interactions are enforced into the company culture. These enhanced operating processes can still be tweaked and modified to achieve greater customer and company success.
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Escalate customer’s loyalty
One loyal customer taking good care could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising. “Couldn’t be any more true”. Loyal customers are the largest source of growth of any business.
Any method of communication you use to communicate with your clients, whether it’s an email, a social media post, or a live chat message, is an opportunity to earn their loyalty. You’ll be able to develop a trustworthy relationship with your clients once they realize that the interaction is easy and useful, and they’ll eventually return to your company.
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Bottom Line
The main purpose of customer interaction is building trust. Customers hesitate to trust new brands as they do not want to lose their hard-earned money by making wrong decisions. But, if they choose your brand, they are your responsibility, you need to assure them that they are not joining hands with the wrong organization and you are worth spending on.
Customer interaction is not only critical for businesses to grow but also for customers, as they expect complete education about how to avail services, how to complain, etc. Especially during the COVID -19 pandemic, when everything went remote and maximum retail shops shifted to online platforms, leaving the minimal choice for customers, hence, relying on their perception and experience was the only option they were left with. They expected online portals to be available 24/7 at their service and solve issues immediately. During this time, some companies started realizing how important customer interaction has been since ever, and they also observed a significant growth in their annual revenue like never before.