How Can Businesses Make Sure We Communicate Effectively In A World Full Of Messages?

A three-step guide for effective customer interactions in 2018

Properly communicating a message is a critical task for any enterprise. It wouldn’t matter if a business sold the best product ever created. If no one knew it existed or knew it was good, no one would buy it.

This truth has been a fundamental understanding of leaders since the beginning of business but is even more important in a modern world inundated with communication channels and flooded with millions of messages competing against each other. For today’s companies, good business communication means doing well in three categories:

1. Connecting with the right people
2. Doing so at the right time
3. Communicating with the right media

When a company can excel in all three phases of business communication customers feel supported and encouraged, and as a result build loyalty and high satisfaction with the company they are communicating with. Succeeding isn’t as simple or as straightforward as it sounds. Here are some tips for communicating properly with modern consumers:

“It wouldn’t matter if a business sold the best product ever created. If no one knew it existed or knew it was good, no one would buy it.”

Connect With The Right People

Not every customer is the same. Any functioning business has customers at various places in their customer journey. Some are prospects in need of the right marketing material before they’re pushed over the edge and convinced to purchase a product or service. Other customers have bought in, but are waiting until their appointment time or for a delivery to arrive. Still, others are in the post-product phase — their experiences with customer service, after-purchase marketing, and the product itself will determine if they recommend your business to their friends or choose to buy from a company again.

Whatever segment a customer falls in should impact the messaging they receive. When communication tools allow messages and campaigns to be targeted to specific types of customers, businesses take the first step towards compelling and effective customer interactions.

Connect At The Right Time

Proper communication isn’t as easy as simply identifying and segmenting your customers based on their customer journey progression. The next step towards success is making sure your messages are received at the right time. By thinking critically about our customer segments we can discern the best time needed for each message to have the most significant impact.

One of our customers books appointments with clients at their homes in advance. When the day of an appointment comes around, they can’t afford to send crews to these customers only to show up to an empty home with no client present. These no-shows waste time and hurt their bottom line. To avoid the wasted resources and save money the business doesn’t let their crews leave for a client until the client has confirmed the appointment and guaranteed they will be present. It wouldn’t be an effective strategy to send these confirmation messages months in advance. Most of us don’t have any knowledge of our hour-by-hour availability until the week or day of any event. Even if a customer could confidently schedule that far in advance, they might very easily forget about the appointment when it finally rolled around. That’s why this company waits until the day of to send their confirmation and reminder messages. For this particular segment and use case, that’s simply the right time for them to get the message across.

Communicate With The Right Channel

In our modern, digital, constantly connected world, the choices for methods of communication are seemingly endless. To interact with a customer a business today can send text messages, emails, letters, use social media, or even physically send an employee to meet a customer at their home or another location. Aligning messages with the right people and the right times can help a business make an impact, but if companies don’t communicate with the right channels even the best and most targeted segmentation can be made useless.

Those reminder and confirmation emails need to be seen and responded to quickly to be effective. There is a short window between sending the messages and the actual appointment time where the customers receiving the messages need to see, read, and respond to them. Email would be a poor choice of channel for such a time-sensitive message. People are likely to miss an email and fail to respond before their scheduled appointment time. Instead, these reminders need to leverage more active channels like text messages.

Other messages, like thank you notes for customers after a successful sale can be sent with less time-sensitive channels. Email may not be checked often, but the channel allows for much richer and dynamic communication than simple text messages. Emails can be much longer than texts, and can easily be filled with multiple relevant images and graphics. When the right message is sent to the right people at the right time through the right channel, businesses make a real impact.

The Right Time For Zappix

At Zappix we’re confident our self-service Visual IVR platform helps companies provide users an innovative, intuitive experience that solves the most common problems they face. The platform is accessible by a plethora of channels, making sure our customers can select the right one for their customer segments. To make sure they are connecting with consumers at the right time, Zappix provides a customizable Outbound Engagement tool.

With Outbound Engagement, Zappix Visual IVR shifts from a passive, reactive CX, to an active, preemptive solution. Outbound Engagement allows companies to send messages to customers whenever the best time is. Campaign integrations make messaging groups or lists of consumers as easy as messaging a single user. Reporting tools help executives understand and analyze large campaigns or see how individual customers responded to various messages. Each aspect of proper business communication is important for delighting customers, but it is critical for businesses to succeed in all three phases if they truly want to ace the modern customer experience challenge.