Nothing spoils a relationship with a customer faster than lack of communication.
Think about it.
There has to be some time in the not-so-distant past when you needed an answer from a company you do/intended to do business with. More than likely you sent an email or left a voice mail for someone in the hopes of quick response, but never got one.
In that instance, what was the impression you were left with?
I thought so.
Now, I’ll disclaim the remainder of my rant by saying that I equate voice mail and talking on the telephone to undergoing a hemorrhoidectomy without anesthesia. Both are equally painful. In fact, if you call my phone and get my voice mail, my voice tells you to call me back rather than leave me a message.
Why?
Because I never check them!
There’s this great feature that’s part of all phones these days. It’s called the display and one of its functions is to tell you that you missed a call. I don’t need to waste 30 seconds dialing in to listen to someone say, “Hi, it’s me, when you get a second, please call me back.” I simply use the display to see I missed a call, and return it.
In my instance, you’re going to get a quicker response if you send me an email rather than dialing me up and most friends, co-workers and clients know that is my preferred method of contact and use it to their advantage – even if it’s just to say “call me.”
When you’re dealing with a large number of current and potential customers, whatever personal rules you have regarding taking and responding to messages need to be tossed out with last nights pot roast. While it may have been perfectly fine to tell customers “we’ll get back to you within 24 – 48 hours” five years ago, it’s not fine today.
Like a horned-up, curb-crawling John on a Friday night, customers today expect instant gratification. If they didn’t, your car insurance company wouldn’t be available at 3:30am to give you a quote on your policy renewal.
During normal business hours, it’s not out of line to expect a response to an inquiry within an hour. Let’s face it, if the pizza joint can whip up a pie, bake it, slice, pop it in a box and deliver it to your door in 30 minutes or less… you should be able to accomplish a call back in that amount of time.
These days it’s far too easy for a customer to head over to your nearest competitor (online or off), ask the same question, get a quick answer and steal the sale right out of your hands.
Here are some tips I’ve put together that every business should employ to improve communication with customers:
- Set clear expectations on your “Contact Us” page as to how long it will take for a company representative to reply.
- State your business hours and note that responses to inquiries will be made during those hours.
- Provide multiple means for customers to be able to contact you. A form is not enough. Give your phone, fax and mailing address as well. If you’re not using a form, provide an email address.
- If you have multiple employees answering emails, consider using a help desk ticketing system or a CRM system to keep track of emails received and responded to so that multiple responses aren’t sent.
- Make sure each employee responsible for answering calls and emails are trained on policies and products. The last thing you want to do is have employees providing different answers to customers.
- Create an internal policy that employees need to follow in regards to answering email and provide them with a clear path to escalate questions they can’t answer on their own.
- On all voice mail recordings, note your business hours and a time frame as to when the person leaving the message can expect a call back.
- Always, always, always, give your customers honest answers. If you were late shipping their package, admit it! Don’t make up an excuse by saying it must have fallen off the back of the truck.
Finally, use the inquiries you receive via email and voice mail to help improve your business. If you’re getting repetitive questions about a specific product, place information on that product page that can alleviate those calls and emails from coming in. If you’re spending a great amount of time giving tracking numbers out over the phone, chances are you need to improve your shipping emails to provide more information on how the customer can track their order on their own.
It doesn’t take much to communicate effectively (and swiftly) with your customers. The time you spend doing it will pay off, just like not doing it will put you out of business.