At the core of all customer experience is communication.
Communication helps direct a customer to the right department, helps make a customer feel valued, and helps give context to a product or service. Communication is among the most important of variables and, in many cases, the easiest to improve.
Sometimes, the simplest things get lost in the sea of complexity that is modern business. In customer experience optimization, many initiatives are complicated, requiring challenges like increased budgets, executive sponsorship, and infrastructure overhauls to even get off the ground.
On occasion however, the easiest wins can be among the most powerful wins, and taking a good look at your standard customer-facing communication is an easy way to quickly improve your customers’ experiences.
Below is a quick checklist you can use to review and improve your customer-facing communication:
- Is the meaning clear?
- Is it open to likely misinterpretation?
- Does it strike the right tone?
- Does it represent our current brand promise?
- Does it accurately reflect our current business model?
- Does it anticipate customer questions?
- Does it anticipate and preempt potential service issues?
Of course, communication has many facets to it. The above list is certainly not inclusive and simply represents a few of the bigger pressure points where customer-facing communication tends to fail.
Run your signage, phone scripts, emails, and other standard communication elements through the questions above. While not every check will be relevant to each piece of communication, the practice of putting your communication through the process can be illuminating. It often doesn’t take long, and you can usually find some easy wins to improve your customer-facing communication.
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