How To Use Customer Communication Management To Grow Your Business
How you go about dealing with customer communications in your business matters more than you might think. An excellent customer communications management (CCM) strategy is at the core of understanding and managing customer correspondence. Customers highly value seamless interaction with you, particularly now that businesses have many touchpoints and communication channels to get through to your business.
However, what exactly is customer communication management? And, how can it help you grow your business?
What is customer communications management?
CCM is a set of practices that your business can use to streamline how you interact with customers. Additionally, CCM helps you build strategies for the creation, storage, and retrieval of customer data and information. One way of doing this is to utilize centralized platforms. Business management software such as this one from Jobber is a niche app for even the smallest of businesses within the field service industry. It effectively allows you to engage with your customers in a consistent brand voice across all your communication channels. No matter what your business type or size, with careful research, there will be an app tailored to suit your needs in customer communication.
Ultimately, CCM improves customer communication efficiency and helps your business identify pain points and find better ways of engaging with customers. This allows you to strengthen your relationship with customers, improving customer retention rates. (1)
How to grow your business with CCM
When you boost how you communicate and engage with customers, you’re in a better place to offer better services. This comes with numerous benefits, one of which is business growth.
Below are some of the ways you can use CCM to grow your business:
- Streamlining customer support
A centralized platform enables you to interactively communicate with your customers in real-time across all your channels, resulting in a better customer experience. When one customer receives excellent support from your business, they’re more likely to spread the word in their circles. Using CCM helps boost customer experience in the following ways:
- Personalization: Due to high customer visibility, CCM enables you to create a much more personalized service for your customers. An example might be in writing better customer service follow-up emails and other types of correspondence specific to a customer. In addition, it makes it easy to support your customers in their preferred channels.
- Consistency: All your communications are built and arise from a central place and then distributed across various channels. This allows you to create consistency in your messaging, whether by phone calls, text, emails, or live chat. Consistency is a crucial ingredient to trust and therefore fosters repeat custom.
- Improved response time: Most customers expect you to respond immediately; delays can significantly lower customer satisfaction rates. CCM helps improve your teams’ response time by having organized, accessible, and easily retrievable customer and business information. (2)
- Enhancing team productivity
CCM also boosts the experience of your customer service employees. This is because they now have access to organized troubleshooting, and customer conversation history, empowering them to deal with all enquiries in a timely and satisfying way. In turn, your team can serve more customers, reduce backlogs and minimize customer complaints as a result.
Furthermore, providing your teams with the right work tools will make them feel empowered. The teams become more productive by using fewer business resources and hours, reducing labor overall labor costs. In addition, you may improve employee retention rates, lowering the costs involved in hiring and onboarding new members. (3)
- Improved internal communication
The growth of a business depends on having efficient systems and processes in place. All functions need to work cohesively as a single unit towards achieving business goals. Your internal communication system needs to function this way as well. The flow of information and communications between teams needs to be seamless. This is the only way your external communications will be efficient.
The organization and visibility that CCM offers will help with collaboration between teams in different departments. Communications received through the service desk, sales team, customer support, and the administration desk are effectively routed to the suitable desk for attention. Similarly, issues that need escalation are easily identified and moved upwards quickly for resolution.
Improving internal communication creates a sense of understanding between teams. Everyone receives issues such as team announcements on the same platform, putting everyone on the same page. A cohesive team working towards the same goal can improve business operations, customer satisfaction, sales, and, ultimately, your bottom line.
- Higher competitive advantage
Improved customer communication helps your business have a competitive edge over other businesses within your niche. For customers, choosing between brands can be as simple as looking at which one has a better customer communication reputation. CCM can improve your customer support experience’s reputation significantly.
By interacting and engaging with your customers better, you may put yourself in the way of customers looking for improved services. You gain more customers, resulting in more sales and a better chance for your business to grow.
Takeaway
Customer communication management helps boost customer engagement and brand loyalty. It also places the right tools in your teams’ hands, improving efficiency and productivity. Good customer experience improves customer retention and attracts new customers increasing sales, boosting business growth.
References
- “Why Customer Retention Is King: The Evolution Of Retention Marketing”, Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerryjao/2014/11/19/why-customer-retention-is-king-the-evolution-of-retention-marketing-part-1/?sh=4cee3b95186b
- “40 Customer Service Stats to Know in 2021”, Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-service-stats?
- “How Employee Engagement Drives Growth”, Source: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236927/employee-engagement-drives-growth.aspx