Your customers are integral to your success. However, these days, fewer and fewer consumers are feeling confident in their finances or purchasing power. So, how do empower your customers and secure greater levels of brand loyalty? Are there ways you can adjust the customer experience to better align with your business’s needs?
Whether you’re investing in your call center and live chat mediums or you’re working with your support team to craft promotions that will make your customers feel valued, here are some ways you can build up your brand while empowering your audience.
1. Focus on customer service.
Whether you’re fielding incoming calls, answering voicemails, or even engaging with your customers over social media and other alternative communication channels, you want to ensure that your customer support efforts remain top-notch. In many instances, customer support integrations can make or break your business.
A call center solution, like inbound call center software, can make it easy for customers to connect with the right agent and for reps and supervisors to move those customers along in your CRM. Key features include interactive voice response (IVR) technology, dialer functionality, call recording, callbacks, and analytics. Look for a contact center solution that empowers your best agents as much as it does your customers.
2. Give back to the community.
While most of your inbound calls are probably routed to the sales team or the help desk, even the smallest of small businesses can find ways to give back to their communities. This is a key component of customer relationship management and it can help you connect with more conscientious customers who like to support meaningful businesses.
3. Use multiple channels.
Customers feel more empowered when they feel like they’re being catered to. After all, convenience is king. These days, customers want to be able to interact with your business through multiple channels. This includes your call center, social media, and website. If you don’t have these key features built out, it could negatively impact the customer journey and lower customer satisfaction. Incorporating advanced features like an instant message function to your site can empower customers as well. Omnichannel routing is becoming a key component of small business functionality.
4. Reward repeat business.
B2C relationships aren’t a one-way street anymore. It’s not about getting customer information like a phone number and blasting SMS promotions or your latest e-mail greetings. Instead, you need to actively facilitate a two-way relationship. Often, this means incentivizing repeat business. If you don’t have an existing loyalty program or rewards setup, these could be the right tools for your success. Once you gain insights into repeat customer behaviors, you can use these metrics to streamline your workflow and improve customer satisfaction.
5. Be transparent.
Transparency is incredibly important these days, especially if you’re collecting detailed information from your customers and using it as part of your sales team’s marketing efforts. The same goes for call recording, SMS and phone number usage, and help desk interactions. All of these can factor into a negative customer journey if you’re not maintaining a degree of transparency.
Let your customers know if recordings will be used to train customer service agents. Alert them to how your phone support team may collect information to use in your Salesforce portal. Have your service team resolve each customer’s issue clearly and explicitly to ensure a great customer experience. Part of empowerment is trust, but that trust needs to be earned by businesses of all sizes.
Between your CRM integrations, agent productivity, and your omnichannel contact center platform, focusing on customer empowerment might not seem like a priority. However, if you put the effort forward, you’re sure to see returns on your investments.
