How to create a communications strategy that will engage, not scare away, your customers

Would your customers say that your communications strategy is a trick or a treat?  Even if you are providing the best candy on the block, your competitors are trying to do the same. This Halloween, we thought it would be helpful to explore how you can use omni-channel automation, AI, and analytics to give your customers a gourd-geous experience when interacting with your company, so you remain their favorite provider.

While trying to keep yourself top of mind with your customers, it’s important to not become their worst nightmare. Only offering one communication channel, mummified strategies, and poorly-timed outreach, oh my! Developing a strategy that allows you to connect with your customers and avoid being an interruption can be a spooky task.

It’s not that your customers don’t like hearing from you, though. Nine out of ten consumers expect the companies that they interact with to deliver content. So how can you deliver this content without being a jerk-o-lantern?

Give ‘em pumpkin to talk about

We tend to think of customer communications as the messages that we send out. But simply blasting out broad messages can drive customers batty. To truly engage your customers, you should be asking them to come knock on your door. One way to get them caught in your web is to create polls or trivia questions that your customers can participate in for a prize. You could send these polls through SMS, email, social media, and even phone calls. Your customers are likely to respond to you if they know there is a treat at the end.

Like the boogeyman or other things that go bump in the night, not knowing your customer’s feedback or recommendations can give you goosebumps. Automated outreach like invitations to complete surveys or provide recommendations after customer service interactions can greatly improve their experience. By inviting your customers to come to you, they can do it on their own time in the way they choose.

Create magical interactions

Allow your customers to take their engagement into their own hands. Good customer experience doesn’t necessarily mean your customers need to speak with a live or undead person. Give them the option to text your company a simple question (like hours of operation, shipment status, etc.) and receive a quick, automated response. Or, provide a chatbot on your website so customers can continue to go about their business while getting their issues resolved. Customers love being able to choose how they interact with you. IDC found that adding one to four new communications channels created a 55% CSAT score increase for companies.

Integrating your communications technology with other business applications can save yourself and your customers a lot of time. Automating bill payment, service outage announcements, goblin sighting alerts, and more keeps customers in the loop and removes the burden of communication from individual teams. Add analytics to your strategy so you can examine interactions and summarize data to improve your overall communications and avoid repeated nightmares.

Personalized content is a ghoul’s best friend

If you’re asking questions from your customers, you should know them somewhat well. You can use natural language processing, like measuring the sentiment of customer feedback, to better understand how they’re feeling towards your company. AI is another powerful tool to help improve customer experience. Nemertes Research found that nearly 53% of contact centers are currently using or planning to use AI for intelligent routing in the next four years. It can also be used to show your customers that they’re important to you. Integrating your communications with your CRM allows you to consider individual customer needs based on the products they use and the history they have with your company to further personalize their experience. AI can take it a step it up even more by routing customers to agents they’ve spoken to before, directing them to local agents based on area or zip code, and more!

Create content that’s relevant to them. Kids know which houses give out the best candy and make a point to go back year after year. Your customers will think similarly. If they know that you’re producing quality content where they can learn and read faboolous Halloween puns, they’ll come to you when they have a few minutes to kill during that day.

To help create a customer experience that’s too cute to spook your customers, take a gander at Atmosphere CPaaS. Easily integrate your existing applications with the Atmosphere CPaaS platform to automate interactions, analyze data from your customers, create interactions through SMS, voice, email, and more.

Happy Halloween!