Open Up Your Organization’s Communication Channels
Creating a system that collects voice of customer feedback in perpetuity is essential to understanding your brand’s place in the minds of consumers. Consumers now have many different opportunities to express their voices to brands, and if your organization is not receptive to this feedback, it could result in disengaged customers, ultimately impacting your ability to confirm long-term relationships. Creating opportunities for customers to ask questions, provide criticism or offer praise can help encourage a sense of community within the relationship, rather than a one-sided, solely profit-driven exchange. Whether customers are reaching your brand via on-site, online or on-the-phone, your brand needs to remain adaptable and open to feedback.
In the modern consumer-to-brand relationship, the most common form of feedback is provided via online reviews. There is a massive collection of consumer-provided information across different social media and review sites, and the ability to sift through respond appropriately to this data can be a differentiator in the eyes of your customer. Reviews serve as a foundational identity to any organization’s digital presence, and every organization needs to have a reputation monitoring system in place. In fact, simply having more online reviews, negative or positive, is important, because with all things equal, the brand with a larger amount of total reviews is selected more often. If your eCommerce store does not have a prevalent reviews section, it is likely that consumers will not have the required level of trust that helps initiate a purchase. Additionally, offering consumers the options to provide feedback can help identify glaring problems with your products or existing brand experience of which you may not have been aware.
Trust is a key reason to open up these communication channels, because with the proliferation of purchasing options, customers are warier about choosing where to spend their cash. One of the best ways to establish trust with a consumer is maintaining highly-engaged employees. If your staff is effectively delivering the desired brand identity when communicating with consumers, then customers will be more likely to move along the customer journey towards a purchase. For example, 60% of consumers surveyed in a program completed by Daymon Worldwide said that they are more likely to buy if they’ve seen a product demonstration on the shop floor. This statistic shows that creating more opportunities for employees to establish communication with customers can help create higher levels of trust within the brand-to-consumer relationship. Like online reviews, training employees to remain consistently open and responsive to customer inquiries can help further entrench your organization as a part of each individual consumer’s life.
Another area where customer communication plays a major role is through an organization’s call-center or phoneline. Like in-store interactions, call-center or phone calls with customers provides an opportunity for brands to provide service on top of being a place to collect feedback. Any employee that answers your phone should be trained to represent your brand appropriately, and while phone calls are being slowly eliminated out of the cultural rolodex, it is important that your brand is equipped to expertly manage these calls. Depending on your target audience, the on-the-phone experience provided by your employees can serve as a major difference-maker in the eyes of your customer.
Ultimately, opening up the communication channels within your organizational structure can help your team collect valuable information, on top of establishing higher levels of trust. There are different sets of goals and guidelines within each channel, and training employees to provide this individualized level of service within each area can prove to customers that you value their time and questions. Whether customers are reaching out online, directly in-store or calling your organization, the best brands are encouraging more communication with customers, and acting on the information provided.
https://nypost.com/2017/08/23/people-are-complete-suckers-for-online-reviews/
https://www.shoppertrak.com/article/better-understand-in-store-customer-journey/
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