It’s a fact: your customers are the heart of your business. Your market is competitive, and great customers come with great expectations. You need more than a good product or service to thrive; you need to provide your customers with a great journey. Customer interaction is a crucial part of each step on the customer journey and is pivotal to your brand’s position in the marketplace.
Customer interaction is significant to the customer experience because it is an ongoing process that can strengthen relationships. It isn’t about the one-time sale, but about the customer’s overall experience with your product, service, or brand.
Let’s take a deep dive into the world of customer interaction. Understand the importance of customer interaction management, how you can improve customer interaction, technologies you can use, and much more.
What is Customer Interaction?
As the name suggests, customer interaction happens every time a customer interacts with your brand. This can happen in many ways, such as a live chat conversation, email exchanges, calls, meetings, social media interactions, and so on.
Customer interaction are present in every step of the buyers's journey, and are essential to determine if someone will make a purchase or not. Understanding how your target audience interacts with your brand is fundamental to develop effective communication strategies, and promote interactions that will encourage engagement, and increase conversion rates.
What is the Importance of Customer Interaction?
Each customer interaction is an opportunity. Understanding its importance of is crucial to taking advantage of each possibility. There are a number of reasons why customer interactions matter, including:
- Transform prospects into customers: Positive customer interactions create trust, which can quickly encourage prospects and leads to convert into customers.
- Create personal connection: Strong, positive customer interactions create personal connections between companies and consumers. Personal connections create repeat customers.
- Build brand loyalty: Personal connections with a company foster brand loyalty, which can improve profitability,
- Encourage customer retention: Returning customers are essential to your business’s success. The way you interact with your customers is what encourages them to come back again and again.
Types of Customer Interactions
Now that you have an understanding of the basics of customer interaction and the importance of customer interaction management, let’s dive into the types of interactions you can use to wow your consumers and enhance their journey.
1. Chat Interactions
Chat interactions that take place on an e-commerce website are often the first opportunity for your business to touch customers. You’ll find that chat interactions can greet new visitors to your site, provide assistance to returning customers, and foster an immediate sense of trust.
- Chatbots: A chatbot, like those offered by JivoChat, is a programmed assistant that can process and simulate conversation just like a real, live human. The chatbot can warm up the customer or lead with basic information so they are more likely to convert when they reach the product page, shopping cart, or a live agent.
- AI chatbots: AI chatbots are similar to other chatbots, but they function a little differently. Their actions are based on canned messages and programmed rules. Interestingly, AI chatbots can "learn" from human conversations and make decisions about responses on their own using natural language. AI chatbots can automate the customer experience and simulate live agent interaction.
- Live chat: Live chat is often a follow-up to a chatbot interaction, when a chatbot passes a customer or lead to a live agent for further assistance or to make a purchase. Live chat is a type of customer interaction that can support the journey and experience, assist with acquisition, and even build rapport and trust among consumers.
Customer interaction - live chat
2. Welcome Messages
Welcome messages provide a way to immediately engage with prospects, customers, employees, and others upon visiting your website. A first-time visitor might get a welcome message explaining your products or services; a welcome message might further build a relationship with a returning customer.
- Website welcome messages: A welcome message on a website, delivered by a chatbot, can serve many purposes. Warm website welcome messages are brief and to the point and immediately connect with customers. The welcome message might introduce a new end-user to your company’s services or products; it also might further establish your brand to returning visitors.
- Welcome email messages: Welcome email messages can make a great first impression to new subscribers and captured leads. Email welcome messages can speak volumes about your company or brand. You might use a welcome email message to send special offers, provide a sign-up form, send videos and additional information, remind customers of an abandoned cart, and much more.
- Welcome text messages: welcome text messages are delivered straight to your cell phone and allow customers to interact via SMS.
Customer interaction - welcome messages
Source: OptinMonster
3. Social Media Interactions
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: these are just some examples of social media platforms with billions of users. They have become part of our daily lives and changed the way customers interact with brands.
- Messenger and WhatsApp inquiries: Let your customers slide into your DMs by taking advantage of popular messaging platforms like Messenger and WhatsApp. Chatbots will let you automate personalized responses on these platforms and make customer interactions feel individualized, not canned. Provide information and create trust by offering quick responses.
- Responding to mentions: Mentions on social media let you interact with customers in a more public way. Consumers are spreading the word about your company when they mention you online. Responding to social mentions lets you engage your audience and demonstrate your customer focus. Respond to mentions quickly, use positive language, and know when to use a more private messaging setting to win at social media mentions.
- Sharing customer social posts: Sharing customer posts and tagging your customers has many benefits. Not only is it another efficient way to build awareness about your company or business, but it also increases brand loyalty. Sharing social posts lets your promoters do the work for you and creates opportunities for natural customer interaction.
4. Customer Retention Interactions
Existing customers want to feel valued, and they want a quick solution to any bumps along the way. Customer retention interactions make up an essential part of the customer journey.
- Special offer messages: Customers often opt-in to communication when they convert. Reaching out to loyal customers via email, text message, chatbot, or social media to share special offers can make customers feel valued and appreciated, as well as encourage additional sales.
- Renewal notifications: Reminding subscribers and ongoing customers with renewal notifications might give you a chance to relay appreciation and even increase the likelihood of continuation. A gentle nudge when it is time to renew is a chance to share new product features, share reasons why they might want to continue to engage, and remind your customers of how your service or product stands apart from the rest.
- Feedback surveys: Everyone likes to feel as if their voice is heard. Customer interactions through feedback surveys are exceptionally valuable to all kinds of businesses. Not only do most consumers appreciate the opportunity to sound off about your product or services, but the feedback they provide to your business can lead to the improvement of processes and procedures.
Customer interaction - feedback surveys
Source: SmartSurvey
5. Customer Service Calls
Customer service calls are another opportunity for customer interaction that come in a variety of forms. They might be incoming or outgoing, provide general relationship management, or even address customer inquiries and/or complaints.
- Customer relationship management: CRM, or customer relationship management, is an essential part of customer interaction management. You might use a CRM tool or database to help you drive these interactions. Consider making outbound calls to customers to maintain connections. Check-in with your customers to see if they are happy with your product or services, share news, offer product support, see if they need anything from your company, and more.
- Inbound calls: Inbound calls are traditional customer service calls made when a consumer makes an inquiry to a company. Customers might reach out to a company to make an additional purchase, receive product support, voice a complaint, or for a number of other reasons. Each inbound call is a chance for customer interaction and an essential step on the customer’s journey.
- Chat transfers: Chatbots are a brilliant solution to many customer experience needs, but sometimes only a human will do. Chat transfers let your website visitors immediately engage and be on the phone with a live agent in seconds or schedule a specific callback time. Service over the phone from a live agent can encourage conversions and provide customized solutions to all inquiries.
Customer interaction -customer service calls
While the list of customer interactions above is comprehensive, it isn’t complete. You’ll find many other opportunities to connect with customers with both proactive and reactive strategies.
However, the methods above are a solid foundation for your business or brand’s customer interaction management process and can help engage all kinds of consumers, especially when following a few best practices.
Best Practices for Customer Interactions
Your customers have great expectations and you need to deliver great interactions. In addition to providing an outstanding product or service, following a few best practices for customer interactions can drive the journey from welcome to repeat conversions.
- Track customer interactions: The right customer interaction management tool is an omnichannel platform that keeps a record of all communication across all channels. This means you should have records of emails, social media interactions, chatbot chats, phone calls, text messages, and other interactions. Save your customers from repeating themselves and impress them by referring to topics they’ve previously mentioned.
- Be proactive: Greet customers who visit your website with a friendly helper. Let a chatbot offer assistance to your customers before they even ask. This will let them know support is available when needed and your company is with them along every step of their user experience.
- Automate customer service: Live agents likely aren’t available 24/7. Consider letting an automated chatbot go to work when live agents aren’t online. Chatbots can respond to customer inquiries and keep a transcript of the conversation for your live agents. In fact, you can even set up action-based triggers that launch chatbots and encourage customer interaction.
- Analyze your processes: Customer interaction management is a process. Constantly monitoring and analyzing your processes will help you determine if there are any gaps in customer communication. Analysis will also help you determine which customer interaction strategies are working well and which need improvement.
- Ask for feedback: Feedback from your customers is essential to analysis and more. Make consumers feel more like stakeholders by asking for feedback. Consider using quick SMS surveys, end-of-call surveys, or seek out even more detail with multiple-question email surveys.
- Use translation technology: One of the most beautiful things about today’s business world is the extensive reach of e-commerce and the diversity that brings. Don’t make your customers communicate with you in their non-native language. JivoChat offers a multilingual chat solution that can translate incoming and outbound messages into 21 languages.
Why Customer Interaction Software is Important
Chatbots are the future of customer interaction. These savvy virtual agents can provide a warm welcome, answer questions, offer additional support, and drive the customer experience even without live agents — ultimately leading to more conversions for your business or brand.
The benefits of using customer interaction software abound. You’ll improve customer service, keep up with emerging trends, take advantage of social messaging, and increase engagement, by taking advantage of chatbot technology.
Let customer interaction management be easy by relying on the right software. From multi-language solutions to omnichannel platforms, today’s customer interaction software will let your business thrive.
Learn more and get started with JivoChat today!
