Article • 3 min read
Five ways in which customer interaction can improve your business
Every customer interaction is a chance to create a relationship with your customers and earn their loyalty.
Emily Hunter
‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’. Similarly, few businesses can survive the first contact with a customer if they aren’t well prepared. Smart entrepreneurs and business owners should know that as soon as they open their doors to customers, they are subject to changes in the very fabric of their business.
Customers will call, customers will interact, and customers will even vent at you and your management. But the truth is, every interaction on any channel (whether good or bad) provides information about how your company can do better. Here are five ways in which customer interaction can improve your business.
Five things that customer interaction can help a business improve:
Customer satisfaction
Training methods
Customer recovery
Motivating employees
Operational procedures
1. Improved customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction rests at the heart of every successful business. Learning how to create positive customer experiences while retaining your company’s culture is paramount to that success. Every customer interaction not only provides insight into the experience of a particular customer, but also adds another data point to your customer base’s satisfaction as a whole.
While you can try and guess what the customer requires from your service reps, only interactions ‘in the field’ can give you the true vision that you need. In some industries, the customer’s happiness can ultimately earn and save a company millions.
2. Improved training methods
Most customer-satisfaction centres have call recording – similar to chat transcripts on live chat – and one of the most potent uses for this call recording is to record the best customer-service interaction and use it to train others. If a difficult customer comes along and their problem is resolved to their satisfaction because of the interaction, it can be used as a case study and folded into part of the training programme.
One of the greatest things about having an engaged customer base is the fact that those who are engaged will offer suggestions, ideas and thoughts about every aspect of your company. By asking management to listen to these ideas, you can find yourself improving the training of your support agents.
3. Improved customer recovery
Customer recovery. Nobody likes to hear these words, but it’s something that happens to those with even the best of intentions. Put simply, it’s the art of calling an angry customer off the ledge to prevent them going to another company or screaming at you.
Everybody who’s ever been in customer service has faced an irate customer (often on a variety of channels). By listening to the customer’s concerns, the rep can learn a little bit about how to handle the next interaction more effectively. The best experience, sad to say, is through trial by fire. Through that fire, employees can grow.
4. Improved motivation of employees
If everyone in your support team is dedicated to improving customer-satisfaction levels by learning from customer interaction, motivation will rise because there will be a decrease in the number of angry customers with whom to deal. Morale improves and employees’ motivation increases when they’re not feeling as if arrows are fired at them during every interaction.
More motivation yields improved customer service, which cycles around so that everyone within the organisation benefits. After all, a smile goes a long way to soothing the savage beast.
5. Improved operational procedures
When businesses are keen to learn from their customer-support teams, operational procedures will begin to change. All of the best practices observed from interaction with customers will become codified within the company culture. These improved operational procedures can always be tweaked and adjusted to yield more success with customers and within the business. All it takes is the willingness to create and encourage the adoption of new practices.
In the end, having a customer-support team that both listens and respects the customer is key to developing the perfect business culture. The experience that you gain when you work with customers is the key to developing and maintaining a successful business.
