Improve Digital Customer Communications 2021

Post-COVID, customer expectations have shifted towards expecting quick, personalized, and secure customer support. It is crucial to revisit ways to improve digital customer communications trends so you can connect with your customers efficiently and continue to build strong customer relationships.

Communicating Effectively with Your Customers

Whether you run an online-only business or a brick-and-mortar company, how you communicate and connect with your customers and clients determines how your business performs. 

Communicating with customers ranges from answering customer calls to sharing informative content about your services online to making your business more accessible to advertising and promoting on multiple platforms.

We will focus on new digital communication technology trends that align with customer expectations in this post.

1. Rise of Smart Chatbots

Most customers expect to see an email or live chat option when trying to connect with a business. This is more common among millennials and Gen Z customers, who prefer email and chat over phone or in-person conversations. 

To connect with this crowd — especially if they are part of your target market — you need to invest in the right tools. Your customer service and sales teams may not always be available for email and chat correspondence, depending on your business size. 

This is where smart chatbots come into play.

Chatbot solutions offered by Drift, Intercom, and the likes can help your company engage with web visitors through personalized and specific interactions and messages. You can use these AI chatbot services to:

1. Improve customer experience for web visitors 
2. Implement conversational marketing
3. Offer personalized solutions
4. Increase marketing ROI

2. Hyper-Personalized Service

Now more than ever, customers expect businesses to offer personalized and customized solutions tailored to their needs and desires. This is because many companies — from small businesses to large corporations — have been offering solutions made specifically for each customer. 

This includes customizations, recommendations, and suggestions — all geared towards making the customer’s experience better. And this is not limited to what you are selling but encapsulates the entire interaction between the customer and business. In other words, customer service, recommendation emails, targeted ads, communication channels, and preferences, etc.

And so, if your business lacks in offering personalized services, chances are, customers will go to a competitor that does.

3. Intelligent and Automated Routing

Ask your phone service provider about ways to include smart routing into your phone system. Smart or intelligent routing is an automation feature that identifies the caller’s purpose and routes the caller to the right destination or assists the caller with predetermined rules set by you. 

Some ways to implement smart routing are:

• Route calls based on the location of the caller
• Time-based routing rules set for different times of the day
• Skill-based routing that directs callers to the most appropriate employee based on the skills needed (e.g., language preferences)
• Route calls based on the customer’s history (past interactions with specific agents or employees), and so on.

By implementing such routing, your callers can go straight to the person they need to talk to without a receptionist’s help and improve caller experience.

4. Multichannel and Omnichannel Support

Don’t be available and active only on 1-2 communication channels. Your competitors are doing more: phone, email, video, live chat, chatbots, and social media. 

Customers are growing more comfortable with email, chat, and social media as spaces for customer support and care. And your business could be missing out on a key demographic by not engaging in multichannel support.

5. Smarter Outbound Calling Tools

Digital customer communications are not only about making it easier for customers to reach your business but making it convenient for your employees to connect with and keep track of all their customers. Here, improved and advanced outbound calling tools can come in handy. We’re talking about: 

• CRMs to store customer data
• A softphone to make and receive calls from any device and any location
• Sales and lead generation tools like SalesLoft, LeadFeeder, and LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator

6. Focus on Privacy and Security

2020 was a year of uncertainties and threats of many kinds (including COVID). Data breaches and scams become more common as customers switched to online browsing and purchasing. As such, customers are more aware of privacy and security issues and they need reassurance that your business is on the right track. 

And so, it is your responsibility to make your customers and prospects aware of and comfortable with your privacy and security policies.

Transparent and responsive service is what customers want and expect from businesses. So take the time to revisit the different touchpoints and improve customer experience and communication at each touchpoint. Gradually build trust and valuable relationships by communicating with your customers and making your business accessible.