6 Ways To Enhance Better Connections With Customers

Enhance better customer connection by improving your business communications. Communication happens on multiple levels, including phone calls, emails, chat messaging, social media, and ads. Because many businesses already use these methods, you have to set your business apart from the competition. So, it’s vital to find effective ways to attract more people and share their thoughts and emotions to connect with your brand.

In this article, you’ll learn some helpful ways to enhance better connections with your customers.

1. Upgrade Your Communications System

If you still rely on traditional landline phones, then think again. It’s probably high time to upgrade your communications system. While the upfront cost of modern phone systems can be expensive, they provide long-term savings and allow you to better enhance customer connection through crystal clear calls.

Those on a tight budget can kickstart upgrading their business communications system using auto dialer apps. Call Cowboy explains that an auto-dial app can help you communicate with your customers using your existing phone but still separate your personal life and business. Yes. You can use your existing telephone to connect to your audience without compromising your personal calls.

Auto-dialer boosts productivity and helps small businesses like much bigger. Here are the benefits of using auto-dial apps:

• Send SMS or text messages
• Receive inbound calls
• Make outbound calls
• Use the app features anywhere worldwide
• Create customized notes on sales leads
• Disposition all calls
• Analyze your performance

Can you skip using the app? Yes, you can. Using a mobile phone direct auto dialer, you can skip the app, allowing you to dial from your smartphone. Check the following benefits of using a mobile phone direct auto dialer:

• No need to download an app
• Smart inbound and outbound calling announcement (know who is calling or you’re calling)
• Create voice notes
• Record conversations
• Disposition calls
• Track calls
• Receive or send SMS
• Analyze sales performance and results

2. Build A Full-Fledged Communication Strategy

Customer connection involves creating a full-fledged communication strategy, which should be embedded in your business’s core. It is imperative to apply the best customer communication practices, likened to using the right business software.

Check the following insightful tips to improve customer communication:

• Build A Customer Support Team: It’s a good idea to create your customer support team, even if you have a small business. One or two employees can manage customer service tasks, focusing on creating different customer engagement activities, such as answering queries by phone and online and formulating customer reward or incentive schemes.
• Set Up Or Outsource A Contact Center: For medium-sized and bigger businesses, setting up or outsourcing a contact center can enhance better customer connections. Contact centers follow strict guidelines to meet key performance indicators (KPIs). Learn more about these call center KPIs below.
• Gather Feedback: You can gather customer feedback through surveys, ratings, and reviews. Read what your customers think about your products and services, regardless if they are positive or negative feedback. Use them as your guide to better understand your audience, to help you create your brand buyer persona or your ideal customer. Creating a buyer persona will be discussed in detail below.

  

• 3. Create Your Brand Buyer Persona

What is a buyer persona? Your buyer persona makes up your ideal customer, which is a research-based profile depicting your target customer. A Call Cowboy describes the needs, preferences, and challenges your customers face. It also shows how they make buying decisions.

Why is creating a buyer persona important? Creating multiple buyer personas can help you understand and empathize with your customers so you can better serve them. It ensures that your marketing efforts are tailored to the needs of your target buyers.

So, how do you create your buyer persona? First, you have to brainstorm your team to keep them informed about your plan in profiling and segmenting your audience. Next, gather data across all sources, including interviews, online surveys, and social media comments. Once you have enough data, check their similarities and differences to profile them properly. Take into account their demographics and buying behaviors.

Here’s how you can implement buyer personas to enhance better connection with your audience:

• Gain Customer Insights: Consumers are naturally attracted to brands they know and trust. One of the best ways to build customer trust and rapport is to show genuine concern by understanding their needs and addressing their pains. By doing so, they will be more open to anything you have to offer.
• Cross-Departmental Alignment: Creating your marketing buyer persona helps ensure that your product development, sales and marketing, and customer support teams have the same view of your ideal customer.
• Build Effective Marketing Strategies: Buyer personas are critical in creating marketing strategies. For instance, buyer personas can help you focus on keyword research for your content marketing strategy to help your site rank in search engines.
• Increase Sales Team Performance: Understand your prospects and come prepared to resolve their concerns more effectively.
• Better Serve Customers: Your customer support team can use buyer personas to serve your clients better. Show empathy and resolve customers’ complaints as soon as possible to avoid frustration and losing their business.

4. Create A Great Website

Build long-lasting customer connections by creating your business website. Consumers search on the internet to find answers to their questions fast and easy, especially during the new normal. The pandemic crisis forced many businesses to build their online portfolio to market their products and services. For this reason, you have to create a reliable, fast-loading, informative, and attractive website.

With many similar businesses as yours in the country and worldwide, it’s challenging to compete with taking a high spot online. As much as you want your website to appear on all the first pages of search engines, the road is not easy. From web design, technical SEO to content details, careful planning is critical to attaining success.

Below are some of the helpful ways to create a great website:

• Implement A Good Web Design: Your web design should prioritize user experience. Make sure to apply easy-to-see and access menus, easy-to-read font, and a user-friendly navigation interface. Don’t overdo images, videos, and other graphic elements. Make it simple, functional, and look professional.
• Offer Self-Service Options: Make sure that your website is equipped with self-service options. In statistical data analysis, it shows that 67% of customers prefer to use self-service than speaking to a customer service representative. So, you need to ensure that your customers find answers using different self-service options on your websites, such as calculators, counters, FAQs, and Q&A sections.
• Don’t Miss SEO: Search engine optimization can be too technical. However, you shouldn’t miss this part if you want to connect to more people. SEO increases your website’s visibility across search engines by using relevant keywords and links to your web content. You can hire an SEO specialist to take care of your SEO needs if you prefer focusing on other aspects of your business.
• Upload Good Quality Content: Increase your organic or unpaid website traffic by uploading good quality content. If you want to create a strong online presence, make sure that your content is relevant, helpful, and engaging. Make your website a rich source of valuable information, which enhances customer connection to a higher level.

5. Analyze Your KPIs

Analyzing key performance indicators or KPIs is one way to streamline the internal business process. KPIs demonstrate how a business achieves its goals effectively. It’s crucial to analyze your KPI to know your business’ strengths and weaknesses.

In contact centers, KPIs are parameters used to measure customer service quality that a business provides to its customers. Managers need to track KPIs to adjust targets and improve overall customer service and sales performance.

Below you’ll find some of the common call center metrics to enhance customer connection and overall brand experience:

• Active Waiting Calls: This metric gives a view of the number of calls currently in the queue. Managers need to monitor this metric to gain real-time knowledge on employee workload to serve more customers better.
• Longest Call Hold: Managers need to monitor the longest hold time to keep customer loyalty intact. Excessive wait times can frustrate customers. Frequent long call hold times would warrant hiring more employees to handle calls to answer customers’ queries and keep them happy with your customer service.
• Call Abandonment: This KPI gives managers helpful insights into the number of callers disconnected from calls before interacting with customer service representatives. The high call abandonment rate reflects customer service inefficiency that must be addressed immediately to avoid losing loyal customers.
• Repeat Calls: It involves identifying recurring issues brought up in calls. The high occurrence rates of particular calls prompt customer service teams and companies to find ways to resolve issues. In this way, the total number of calls coming in for those issues will decrease.
• Average Handle Time: It enables managers to track the average duration of a call. Monitoring average handle time helps team members and managers understand the workload required for every customer call and gauge employee efficiency.
• Customer Satisfaction: This KPI provides managers and team members a direct view of how customers view the company. It indicates their level of contentment and happiness with the resolution provided. Net promoter score (NPS) measures customer satisfaction by determining how likely a customer will recommend a product or service to family and friends.
• Call Resolution: It involves tracking the number of calls resolved in terms of specific data points like first call resolution rate and required shared calls to be resolved. Contact centers must ensure those customer problems are resolved from the first time they called about them.

6. Show Customer Appreciation

Many customers love freebies, incentives, promotions, and rewards because these are all forms of money-saving tactics. It’s a smart idea to reward your customers for building their loyalty along with offering high-quality products and services.

Showing customer appreciation means giving value and responding to their efforts. It’s a great way to connect to your customers because it leaves a lasting mark. Gestures of appreciation don’t necessarily mean giving monetary rewards. There are various ways to show customer appreciation, even in simple things, such as acknowledging their feedback.

Here are some amazing ways to show appreciation to your customers:

• Develop A Customer Reward Program: Keep customers coming back and avail of your products and services by developing a customer reward program. Loyalty cards or reward cards that earn points or provide discounts every time a customer purchases an item from your store is one good example. Another is customer referral, wherein a customer gets a discount or freebie item or service for every referral.
• Give Prizes And Freebies: Connect with your audience by holding social media contests and electronic raffle draws, and give cool freebies and giveaways using branded merchandise. Some examples include custom t-shirts, mugs, bags, and pens. Ensure high-quality branded merchandise even if they’re just giveaways because their quality also reflects your business.
• Customer Mention: Mention your loyal customers (ask permission first) on your social media page or one of your blog posts. Shout out loyal customers on your YouTube videos. Personalize email and mail correspondence by addressing your customers by their first name.
• Make Customer Experience Special: Customers have availed and experienced similar products and services. And what sets their best experiences apart from the others are the brands that made them extra special. You can do it by including personalized ‘Thank You’ notes on shipping packages, engaging with them even after a closed sale, and following-up with them from time to time.

Conclusion

There are many ways to enhance better connections with customers, including improving communications systems, such as using auto dialer apps to connect to customers seamlessly using any device. Creating your marketing buyer persona helps profile and understand customers to increase their trust in your business.

Building your contact center is one effective way to connect with your audience, provide excellent customer service, and gain more loyal customers. It’s also crucial to build your online presence to connect to more consumers by creating a great website. Most of all, don’t forget to show how much you appreciate your customers by acknowledging their feedback and giving them simple tokens or rewards.