Your customers will talk to you in many different places and through many different mediums. You need to audit these touch points from the customer’s perspective to ensure that those communication channels are meeting your customer’s needs.
Face-to-Face
As a business owner or the representative of a company, you’ll talk to customers in person. Regardless of the topic, you represent the company and will directly impact the customer’s perception of your business. Remember to keep your focus on the customer with a customer-centric approach and you’ll find it much easier to uncover and meet customer needs.
Website
Your website will be the first impression that many of your prospective customers will have of your company. Your site needs to be optimized to do three things: help the customer solve their problem, convince customers to buy from you, and actually be usable. If you haven’t observed a customer using your website in the last month, you need to set up time and start learning. A few minutes with a customer will uncover a mountain of problems with your current website that you can then improve.
Social Media
Your customers are talking to you. You need to include social outlets like Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, etc. in your customer service plan. When customers are talking in a public forum, it is a great opportunity for you to transparently address any questions or concerns and solve their problem.
Call Center
Many customers will call you on the phone to conduct business or get help. How is your phone experience from the customer’s perspective? Whether you hire a call center outsourcing service or answer the phones yourself, you need to avoid the the pain points that so many customers face on the phone. Enable your representatives to actually solve problems and loosen the scripts so that your employees are empowered to meet the customer’s needs without sounding like a broken record.
Direct Mail
Are your direct mail pieces integrated with your other channels? If your customer acts on your call to action, they will end up calling on the phone, visiting your website, or seeing you at your storefront? If these pieces aren’t integrated, the customer sees a very disjoint experience which can only lead to friction and less than ideal experiences for your customers.
What other ways do customers hear from you or talk with you? What are some problems that you’ve seen at those touch points? What did you do about it?