Connecting with Customers

Just as technology allows you to have a team of coworkers spread across the country or even the world, it also allows your customers to more easily access the products and services you offer.  Staying connected with your customers is as important as staying connected with your team members who help you deliver those products and services.

Customers may be looking for and using a number of methods of communication to interact with the brands, products, and services. With social media, customers demand responsive human interaction with companies. Digital communication tools can provide those avenues, but they also need to complete the social communication model’s circuit if they’re going to be effective.

Let’s take a look at what’s out there.

• Project and document sharing tools: These tools exist to help support your side of the conversation. Tools like cloud-based Google Suite allow you to pull up all your documents and information by contact. Have a meeting with the XYZ Widget Company? You can search all of your recent documents, show you records of past email exchanges, and so on. Digital tools support your communication with a customer, but it does not take you past the “message” part of the social communication model.
• Websites: Almost every company has one to provide their customers with information about their products and services, as well as how to contact the company. Usually, they feature information they are legally required to supply, like annual reports and financial filings. Your company’s web design communicates your brand promise and personality. However, it’s essential to recognize that a website, while serving as a digital storefront, inherently functions as a one-sided form of communication.
• Blogging: This is a passive form of communication with your customers because it may be one-sided and allows for minimal to no feedback. Blogging allows you to communicate information to your customers and establish that all-important personality that customers are looking for in companies.
• Social Media: Social media has become a common tool for companies to engage with their customers. Consider the real-world example of a fashion retail brand that actively utilizes social media platforms to communicate with its audience. Through regular social media updates, the brand shares not only information about new products but also insights into fashion trends, styling tips, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the design process. Customers can then decode these messages, interpret them, and provide immediate feedback in various forms, such as likes, comments, shares, or direct messages. This interactive cycle enables real-time communication and engagement, and the feedback can be used to gauge the effectiveness of the communication, understand the audience better, and tailor future messages accordingly. Noise in social media can include algorithm changes, information overload, or misunderstandings due to the lack of nonverbal cues.
• Private message and “chat” tools: Customers now anticipate the presence of chat options, enabling direct interaction with customer service representatives. They also encounter AI-driven programs that facilitate conversations through canned conversational openings, encouraging visitors to engage in discussions that might not have occurred organically. While the nonverbal aspect of communication is absent in this digital platform, inevitably introducing some “noise,” the advantage lies in the potential for feedback collection. This interaction, although one-sided in terms of nonverbal cues, effectively closes the social communication model’s circuit.
• Video chat: Some companies are employing video chat tools to deal with customer service matters, and doing so with great success. It is the next best thing to a face-to-face conversation and provides the communicators access to all methods of communication. The social communication model is easily closed with feedback on noise, and active listeners can consider non-verbal cues. The same holds true for this tool where more robust relationships with customers are the foundation of the business—lawyers, teachers, and therapists are among the many professionals who rely on careful face-to-face communication to perform their jobs effectively, and this type of communication facilitates that interaction.