Communicating with your customers is important. It keeps them educated and engaged, which sparks repeat business. This is proven by research. Studies actually show that 38% of customers say they want product updates, 37% want personalized promotions, 29% want to be asked to receive alerts on their phone, and 27% want brands to offer help them before they have a problem. Fortunately, there are a lot of apps and tools that help you do this today. You’ll want to take a look at them so you can fulfill your clients’ desires.
Talk to Your Customers
Although you want to communicate directly with your customers sometimes you just don’t know how to do this successfully. This can become even more tricky when you have several people working on this. As such, you’ll want to look into one of these tools:
- Smart Suite allows you to text your customers, send digital receipts and create personalized ads. With this tool, you can also collect customer data. Once you’ve done so the information is easily accessible for you to analyze, interpret, and use so that you can improve your sales.
- Owner Listens is a great way to let your customers use their mobile device to send messages to your business. You can then respond to them in real-time too. This is a great way to send them a thank you note or to offer them some help. From your dashboard, you can view all these messages in one place. Since this is accessible from any browser you and your team can all work together to send out such messages.
- Five Stars allows you to set up a loyalty program so that you can reward your customers. With it, you also have the ability to communicate directly with your customers. Additionally, you schedule and send promotions to certain customers, set up automatic offers based on how they visit your site and when their birthday is, and analyze your customers’ data to learn more about the people who love your business.
Managing Customer Service and Feedback
Once you’ve established an open line of communication with your clients you’ll want to focus on getting their feedback on how you’re doing. This is the best way to give your customer service a boost. Some great tools that will help you here include:
- Real Time is a great way to communicate with your customers when they need help. This is a great tool that lets your customers share their computer screen with you. By creating a “co-browsing experience” you can show them your products or walk them through the services you have available.
- Live Agent will help you quickly resolve your customers’ problems. With this tool, you have access to a variety of features (e.g. live chat, social media support) that will help you identify and solve these problems for your customers. These features allow you to customize this tool to fit your business model and quickly handle any complaints you receive.
- Dezide is a “guided troubleshooting app” that lets you create FAQs and knowledge bases to use as self-service tools for customers who visit your website. You can also design one for your customer service reps to use when they need help. The step-by-step directions you create in this app can include videos, images, and a built-in search option.
- Toonimo helps you help your customers get more out of your website by creating a concierge-like experience that guides your visitors through your website. This is a great way to show them how to navigate your site, use specific products, and complete online forms because it uses animated graphics coupled with a human voice.
- Mention tells you what your customers are saying about you on discussion boards, review sites, and social media. With so many channels being used by your customers today, it’s almost impossible to watch what your customers are saying about your business all the time. However, when you use Mention you receive real-time updates when your business is mentioned online. You can even read and respond to these comments directly from the app.
Schedule Virtual Meetings
While all these tools are great, you don’t want to get ahead of yourself. Doing so will cause you to lose the “personal touch.” This is why virtual meetings are so important today: They let you be face-to-face without spending time and money on travel expenses. When you’re ready to schedule a virtual meeting, consider using one of these tools to do so:
- Bookafy allows your customers to book, cancel, reschedule and pay for appointments without long wait times, playing phone tag, or waiting for you to answer their email. With this scheduling software, you can even send automated confirmation messages through text messaging.
- Pro Business Tools is great for any business that sends technicians out to help their customers. This is because it lets you arrange technicians by coverage area, expertise and availability. Customers can also book an appointment with a technician that meets their needs.
- UberConference is beneficial for businesses that work with clients and vendors from throughout the world. This is because it lets you host virtual video and audio meetings online with multiple people all present at the same time. Anyone who’s present can share documents, photos and video clips. When someone can’t be present for the meeting you can record it for them to watch later.
- Doodle is a great way to schedule your virtual meetings. Simply select several blocks of time that you have available and Doodle will find a time that works for everyone. Since it also integrates with calendars, nobody will be present.
With so many apps and tools available to help you communicate with your customers it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Hopefully this list will help your business get organized and fight this feeling so you can be more productive.
