Customer Communication: 6 Key Strategies For Ecommerce

A successful business doesn’t just require a stellar product—customers also desire to feel like their voices and concerns are significant. In truth, 85% of consumers update that their favorite brand “treats them like an person.”

Katherine Oyer, owner of modern baby apparel store Francis Henri, is concentrated on building this benevolent of connection.

“If you have a wonderful customer encounter and a superior product, people arrive back,” Katherine says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “I have always felt word of mouth and loving on your customer, turning them into clients, making them friends—I discover those are the advertising dollars I’d rather spend.”

Customer communication management is critical to building relationships with buyers. It can enhance the customer encounter, inspire referrals, and assist you garner repeat business.Here’s how businesses communicate with customers, and six communication tips to assist you enhance your brand reputation and boost customer loyalty.

Types of customer communication

• Phone
• Live gossip
• Email
• In-person
• Social media

Effective communication strategies involve multiple communication channels and methods. Here’s an overview of ordinary types:

Phone

Many businesses allow customers to contact them by phone, either employing a 24/7 answering service or restricting calls to specific business hours. Phone calls can be an efficient and convenient way to resolve issues and construct customer relationships, but you can receive only so many calls at once—and customers can become frustrated by long hold times.

You can minimize response period by using call menus to route customers to the correct department, offering call-back services, and including information about self-service options in your recorded greeting.

Live gossip

Like phone calls, live chats can propose immediate and personalized back. They also allow agents to field multiple customer requests at once, which can make them a expense-effective alternative to phone back. Some companies also augment live gossip services with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, which can respond questions like “Where’s my order” or “How do I commence a profitability” and automatically route more complicated requests to the appropriate throng member.

Email

Email is an asynchronous communication channel, which can make it a convenient alternative for you and your customers. Clients can send questions whenever they have them (including at 2 a.m. or over a holiday weekend), and you can reply on the next business day or during whatever period block you set aside for responding to customer emails.

It can be less effective for urgent requests, but you can keep customers in the loop by sending an automated initial response that confirms the receipt of an inquiry and lets them recognize when they can expect to listen back from your throng. You can also include directions to more immediate back options, if applicable.

In-person

You can also communicate with customers face to face or blend in-person and digital interactions. Francis Henri offers a buy online, pickup in-store alternative that allows customers to arrive in and talk to store personnel, inquire questions, and browse. They also propose curbside pickup.

“If there is a mom who has a sleeping baby, we’ll get messages that declare, can you just run my bag out?” says Katherine.

Social media

There are multiple ways to communicate with customers on social media channels. You can receive direct messages on Instagram, X, and Facebook Messenger, reply to social media posts that tag your brand, and interact with customers in the comments section of your business’s posts.

Use social media monitoring tools (also known as social listening tools) to track conversations about your business and receive a proactive way to customer boost in worth and back.

How to ensure great customer communication

• Use a varied communication way
• Maintain a consistent brand voice
• Engage your employees
• Personalize customer interactions
• Solicit customer feedback
• Provide a personal touch

Great communication can boost customer depend in your brand, helping you attract and retain customers and encouraging existing customers to spread the word about your business. Here are six strategies to enhance your customer communication efforts:

Use a varied communication way

Do you have any friends who despise talking on the phone? Or a relative who can’t seem to figure out social platforms? Odds are that versions of these people exist in your customer base, too—their communication preferences might be peculiar, but they’re also powerful.

Diverse communication strategies allow customers to choose a communication way based on their distinctive channel preferences—whether that’s email, direct communication, live gossip, or phone. It involves offering multiple outreach options and providing a unified cross-channel encounter.

Unified inboxes and customer connection management (CRM) systems can consolidate outreach from customers coming from various channels. It stores customer data in a centralized location, allowing your back throng to provide a consistent customer encounter and efficiently manage multiple channels.

Maintain a consistent brand voice

Your brand voice is a critical part of your business’s identity. It informs your written content, how you display up in online spaces, and how customers comprehend the worth you provide. It’s also not just the marketing department’s responsibility. You can enhance customer communication and strengthen your brand image by helping throng members adopt your brand voice for sales and back interactions. Use your brand voice in internal communications, and inspire reps to remain consistent across channels.

You can also include service-concentrated brand voice examples in your brand guidelines. For example, if your voice is upbeat, positive, and playful, you might inspire the use of exclamation points and emojis, and alert against formal language or technical jargon.

Engage your employees

Customer service training can assist your employees boost customer satisfaction by offering consistent, high-standard back. Here’s what to include:

• Policies and procedures. Assess your throng’s knowledge base, invite questions, and provide them with current copies of your customer service policy guidelines. You can also prompt throng members where to look when questions arrive up.

• Skills-building. Live demos, self-reflection activities, and real-life call recordings demonstrate situations that can assist your reps construct empathy, enhance communication skills, and form better relationships with customers.

• Tricky situations. Customer service training also prepares your throng members to handle customer complaints in a respectful and timely manner. Consider role-playing challenging calls or inviting your throng to workshop solutions to a proposed scenario.

🌟 From energetic listening to improvisation to resilience, here’s what you require to recognize to develop customer service skills for you and your throng.

Personalize customer interactions

Research shows customers expect personalized interactions and reward businesses offering them. To enhance personalization, store customer data in a centralized location (like a CRM) and use it to personalize relevant communications, including emails, outreach calls, and marketing messages.

You can also store service call information in customer profiles—allowing your throng members to pass service tickets between reps or departments without losing information—or use an AI-enabled virtual assistant to automatically recap calls.

Solicit customer feedback

Customer feedback can provide insight into customer expectations and experiences, helping you better comprehend your target spectators and identify areas for advancement.

Popular options include surveys, reviews, customer focus groups, and one-on-one interviews with existing customers. You can also use customer service tools to automate requests and identify trends in large volumes of data. Focus on the entire customer trip—not just service communications—and recall that feedback requests are customer interactions. It takes period and vigor to provide feedback, so display boost in worth with personalized responses or rewards.

Provide a personal touch

Don’t underestimate the worth of getting personal. You’re a real person, and your customers are too—so construct connections by focusing on the shared human element.

“We send a handwritten thank you card in every package,” says Katherine, adding that she doesn’t cut corners on these details. “The customer encounter is so significant for me. I wanted the encounter of receiving a box to be almost like a gift.”

You can also display your boost in worth with personal thank you calls, emails, or invite-only customer events. Communicating effectively is about bringing your authentic self to the table, so don’t overthink it. inquire yourself why a customer’s loyalty matters to you, and declare (or type) that.