When businesses think of communicating with customers, typically they envision having a customer service department that fields customer complaints via phone calls and email. However, in the digital age, customer service can’t just be thought of as something that is delegated to a separate department. Instead, customer communication is a holistic business strategy that needs to be tied directly into a business’s goals and objectives. Whether an employee works in sales, marketing, or even engineering, they are effectively dealing with customer communication. This includes everything from how a product or service is sold and communicated to customers, as well as how a product or service is designed or experienced by a customer.
To make the ethos of customer communication a clear priority of your business, you should consider implementing a customer communication management system. This system allows you to focus on creating the right sort of customer experience and holistically working on every stage of the customer journey. This can be done by systemizing all customer communication through a centralized hub so that you can customize and partially automate all of your customer interactions. This has the added benefit of creating a standardized experience so that employees can easily follow the guidelines of how to best interact with customers.
Explaining Customer Communication Management
Customer communication management or CCM, should be thought of as how a business strategically communications with its customers. CCM is typically performed through either a tool or software that brings together disparate conversions under a single umbrella. This not only helps with standardization, as stated above, but also can help with organization and consistency across an organization.
As much as this should feel intuitive, the truth is that customer communication is not just about how you correspond with a customer. It means that employees across an organization need to take a more customer-centric approach and make sure that customer communication isn’t just limited to reactive complaints. Rather, CCM takes a proactive approach to customer communication and allows everything from sales and marketing efforts to the actual design of products and websites to be intuitive to what a customer wants. CCM also proactively engages with customer feedback so as to create a better and more nuanced customer journey.
In summary
Ultimately, customer communication takes one of two forms. These forms are live interactions, such as phone calls or live chat through a website, and digital interactions such as email and support tickets. A CCM process takes both of these types of communication into account and uses tools to tag and upload these conversations to create a holistic picture of a customer. This can be used to create buyer personas, find areas for improvement, and even free up bottlenecks with your own processes.
This is why CCM is so essential for businesses that are using both live interactions and digital communication so as to get a better picture of the customer’s wants and needs and better incorporate these into business goals.
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