How to build a customer interaction strategy
If you offer omnichannel customer support, you should develop and amplify the customer interaction strategy to ensure consistency across every interaction. One important piece of a strategy is enabling the support team. It’s impossible to achieve success in customer interactions without securing buy-in from well-trained employees. You can follow the below 4 steps to build a robust CIM strategy.
#1 Create a training plan for customer interactions
Create a plan: Your support agents are the customer-facing team that manages the majority if not all of the customer interactions. That's why you need to train your support team. Understand the skills that are important for customer success. Develop a list of competencies you’ll need to train your reps for. What are the common situations that your team encounters during customer interactions?
Practice: Once you’ve gone through core skills, create roleplay situations for your team to practice their skills and receive feedback. Ensure every interaction includes the five steps of the customer interaction cycle for full marks.
Assess: Identify areas for improvement for each employee and provide ongoing support and training. Improve and develop skills over time through quality assurance and interaction reviews.
#2 Segment your customers
One thing to consider when building this strategy is that it will serve many customers. Here’s how we recommend you segment your customer base:
New customers: These customers are new to the company, but they have made their first purchase already.
Existing customers: These customers have been in a relationship with your business for some time.
Past customers: These customers have purchased in the past but are no longer buying from your business.
Prospects: These are a set of potential customers who need more information before making a purchase decision.
Segmenting your customers makes it possible to route them to different teams specializing in understanding and serving each group. Let’s look at how we can use customer segments to encourage personalized customer interactions.
#3 Encourage personalized customer interactions
When developing a customer interaction strategy, it might be tempting to put scripts and checklists in place for your agents to follow. But customers don’t want to feel like they are only a cog in the system - they want to feel like they are treated as humans. A script will only make agents complacent and restricted in what they can do to connect and make a good impression on the customer.
With every stage in the customer interaction cycle, there’s an opportunity to personalize the response and build a relationship with the customer. Use the customer’s name when greeting them. Empathize with their situation while you understand what they need. Propose a thoughtful solution, one that anticipates any other needs they might have.
Client interaction might sound like a formal business process, and it can be. But it doesn’t have to mean abandoning your brand personality when you interact with customers. Don’t think of it as a script but as a framework for more valuable customer interactions.
#4 Develop a multichannel interaction strategy
The number of communication channels is ever-increasing, and in today’s connected culture, customers expect you to deliver a better customer experience than their last interaction. That’s why it is important to have a multichannel customer interaction strategy. Allow your customers to initiate interactions across their preferred communication channels. So, it’s best to develop a customer interaction strategy that includes more than one. Your customers may contact you through live chat, social media, email, review sites, SMS, or community forums. While each interaction might look slightly different, they still need to follow the customer interaction cycle, adapted for the format of where you are interacting.
It might not be possible to resolve every issue on every channel. For example, social media interactions are often public, making them inappropriate for conversations around subscription billing and product pricing. You may move your customer to a more secure, private channel to deliver what they need. However, don’t move customers unnecessarily. If you can close the interaction on the same channel the customer initiated their question on, it’s much easier for everyone.
#5 Develop a multichannel interaction strategy
Chatbots can save you both time and money by directing customers to relevant pages and answering frequently asked questions. Operating much like a vetting service, chatbots are a customer interaction service that can filter through customer interactions and determine which need to be attended by a member of staff. By utilizing customer data, you can analyze which problems, or pain points, in the customer journey are most common and program chatbots to recognize these topics.
You can also program chatbots to recognize multiple languages, automatically improving your customer interactions for non-English speaking customers. Where previously you would have needed to employ bilingual staff, if a chat bot is able to perform the role at no extra cost, the upfront price of investing into new tech can save you money in the long run.
#6 Use feedback to inform your interactions
When interacting with customers, pay attention to what they say and how they respond. Whether it’s directly asking for feedback in the form of a questionnaire or recognizing trends in customer interactions, there are multiple ways to help you understand how your customers feel. While not every interaction will be actionable, you can use a broad collection of data to inform future decisions.
For example, if you find that you get better click through rates (CTR) on your emails when you use less technical terms, it could be an indication that your audience isn’t as informed as you first thought. If you suspect this could be the case, you could experiment with the language you use in your interactions.
If you’re unwilling to completely change tact, why not try A/B tests? Following on from the previous example, split your email audience in two and measure the differences in interaction between an email that uses technical language and an email that uses simplified language.