It is not enough for your business to just provide an excellent product or service. You also need to be able to connect with your customers. That might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many business owners underestimate the importance of customer engagement! Just attracting new customers isn’t enough. Building a connection is what encourages consumers to buy, and most importantly, what gets them to come back. Effective customer engagement develops trust and loyalty and provides you with information about how people are using your product; a win-win for both parties.
Do you truly understand how to how to engage your customers, though? While the best practice tips vary between industries, one fundamental way of doing this is through customer service and the channels you provide it through. But, with so many marketing channels available to stay in touch with your customers, how do you choose which to use? In this article, we’ll review 6 marketing channels to use for your customer service and to improve customer engagement.
It is likely that you are already providing customer service via email, and there are certainly benefits to doing this. It’s great for busy customers with simple queries. Conversations take time, whereas you can fire off a quick email between other tasks. Plus, it offers you an easy way to contact your customers en masse through newsletters and special offers.
The downside is the lack of immediacy. Response times to customer emails can be long, with studies finding that companies average a response time of over 12 hours. Certainly not ideal for urgent enquiries!
Web forms
Web forms have the same benefits and pitfalls as emails, but with one crucial difference in that, your customer doesn’t have to leave your website to contact you. Not only is this more convenient for your customer, but it also keeps them on your website for longer, increasing the chance that they’ll make a purchase. Another plus to using web contact forms is that you can decide which personal details your customers provide so you can collect the data that’s most useful to you.
Phone calls
For urgent enquiries or those that require a lot of back-and-forth, a phone call is ideal. Although phone calls are unpopular with younger customers (who prefer text-based communication), you’d be remiss not to provide it as a customer service channel. In fact, 69% of customers state that their queries are fully addressed with live assistance from a phone call.
Phone calls make a stronger personal connection than email, and customer enquiries can be solved quickly, without waiting hours for responses. Most importantly, it’s a lower-tech form of communication that’s accessible to an older or less tech-savvy audience. The downside is that you’re limited by how many customer service agents you have. Each can only deal with one customer at a time, meaning other customers may have to wait on hold during busy periods.
Live chat
Live chat offers the best of both worlds: the quick response time of a phone call with text communication flexibility. Your customer service agent can handle multiple customer queries at a time, reducing the frustration of long phone queues. The benefits of direct conversation with your customers for building rapport can’t be overstated, and live chat gives you the opportunity to do precisely that. By taking the time to learn your customer’s needs and build a personal connection, you’re much more likely to turn your customer’s visit to your website into a sale.
Social media
With people now spending around 2 hours on social media a day, building a strong social media presence is more important than ever. Carefully curated posts will attract new customers while keeping your current audience engaged, and it’s also the most immediate way to provide up-to-date company news. Take a few minutes every day to share posts, respond to comments, and watch your customer engagement skyrocket.
With new sites popping up constantly, managing social media can easily feel like a full-time job by itself. Choose sites that are best suited to your audience. For example, a young customer base might respond well to TikTok, but older customers lean towards mainstays like Facebook. For social media customer service, Facebook and Twitter are often the best bet.
Video chat
With COVID-19 reducing opportunities for face-to-face contact, many businesses are opting to provide customer service via video chat. Giving your customers the chance to see the real people behind your company does wonders for building rapport and making personal connections. However, video chat does come with the same downsides as phone calls as it requires an immediate time commitment from both parties, and only allows for contact with one customer at a time.
All in all, there’s no simple answer to which marketing channel to choose. Your customers will be happiest if they can contact you through their own preferred method when it suits them, so cover your bases by providing as many options as you can. Engage with your customers through the marketing channel that works best for them, and they’ll be much more likely to stick around.
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