Customer Interaction

What is customer interaction?

A customer interaction refers to any communication between a customer and a company. Every interaction with a customer is a chance to connect with them, delight them, and increase their retention and advocacy.

The importance of customer interactions for customers

Customer interaction is a cornerstone of building a successful relationship a business and its customers. Whether it’s announcing new products, explaining new services, or asking for feedback, every interaction is a chance to demonstrate value and remind customers why they should buy from you.

Customers have specific expectations when interacting with companies and support teams in particular. When a customer contacts a business, they’re looking for:

• Reliability: Customers want to know if your business is dependable. Delivering good customer service, ensuring constant follow-up, and acting on customer feedback can help you gain their trust and maintain customer loyalty.

• Assurance: Your customers must be assured that they’ve made the right choice by doing business with your company. Real-time assistance along the customer journey can help you meet their expectations and validate their decision.

• Empathy: Your customers want to be understood. They want to feel like the support teams can see from their point of view. Personalized customer interactions across different touchpoints can help your customers feel heard.

• Responsiveness: Your customers don’t want to wait. They are looking for a quick and effective resolution to their problems. The availability of self-service options, chatbots, and timely responses helps you reduce churn and build a pool of happy customers.

STEP 1: Greeting

Getting started on the right foot begins with greeting the customer. While often short, greetings are the first step to proactive support and set the tone for the rest of the customer interactions. This helps customers form their first impression of your service.

There may be instances when it’s not possible to greet the customer right away. For example, if you provide support via email outside business hours, it’s important to acknowledge that the communication has been received. Auto-responses are a great way to let customers know they were successful in getting in touch and that they’ll be hearing back from someone soon.

That said, customers expect you to respond to and resolve their issues as quickly as possible and take the necessary steps to shorten the wait time.

Examples of customer interaction (Greeting):

• “Hi, Thanks for contacting us! How can I help you?”

• “Hello, you’ve reached [Company Name]. What can we assist you with today?”

• “Good afternoon! I am [agent name]. I’d be happy to assist you today. How can I help?”

STEP 2: Understanding

The next step in the customer interaction cycle requires you to focus on what your customer needs. Building a customer-centric culture requires assessing how your customers feel by collecting enough facts and getting the required context for their problems. This often involves asking the right questions, which is invaluable for getting to the root of what a customer wants. You may need to ask why several times before getting to the real cause of their inquiry.

Another major component of understanding is active listening. That means being present and paying attention. Tune into your conversation with the customer, avoid interruptions and let them finish. Repeat what’s been heard to allow the customer to confirm that you successfully interpreted what they were trying to convey. Keep in mind that every customer is important. A company rep will handle multiple interactions in a day, but for a customer, it’s the only interaction they’ll have with the company that day or perhaps ever. Therefore, it’s important to treat each case with utmost care.

When speaking with a customer on the phone, another way to understand is simply by listening to the tone of their voice. This will be a key indicator of whether their sentiment changes during the conversation.

Examples of customer interaction (Understanding):

• “Can you tell me more about that?”

• “Is there anything else I should know?”

• “From what I understand…”

STEP 3: Agreeing

After greeting your customer and understanding where they are coming from, you move on to agreeing to help and find a solution to their problems. Helping a customer requires mutual agreement on the desired outcome of the interaction. This is where you need to show empathy, set expectations and offer possible solutions across preferred communication channels.

At this stage, it’s important to focus on offering a quick and effective solution. Some customers may ask for things that just aren’t possible. When this happens, it’s good practice to be upfront about limitations, then communicate what can be done. If there’s an opportunity to do something similar to what they’re asking for, it can often be as acceptable to the customer as their original request. When no other solutions are available, going the extra mile to offer resources like free months of service, exclusive discounts, or special gifts is a good idea. This gesture improves customer satisfaction and encourages customer retention. 

Once a solution is proposed, communicate with your customer, giving them a chance to indicate if anything is unclear. Make sure your customer understands if there are any missing steps you can help them with to make the most of this solution.

Examples of customer interaction (Agreeing):

• “What I can do is…”

• “Right now, we can offer…”

• “Does this sound acceptable to you?”

STEP 4: Delivering

To start delivering what has been agreed on, you’ll need to be as clear and open when communicating with a customer about what you’re going to provide.

If it’s going to take a little longer to resolve the issue that the customer is experiencing, you need to keep them informed. Let them know how things are going, what’s happening and when you’ll be in contact next.

That way, the customer isn’t out of the loop and is aware that you are working towards a resolution for them. Once you have reached the end of the delivery stage, everything must be resolved and the customer completely satisfied.

Examples of customer interaction (Delivering):

• “Here’s what I’m going to do to resolve this.”

• “For you to have all you need, I’m going to do…”

• “Is there anything else I can do?”

STEP 5: Closing

Finally, your experience with the customer should finish up with a statement that lets them know that if they need any further help, they should get in touch again. Saying thanks to the customer for getting in contact can show a real appreciation and go a long way into showing customers that they are indeed valued by your company.

The most important part of finalizing a customer interaction is a follow-up call or email. This is a crucial way of checking if the customer is satisfied with the resolution and that you have met their expectations.

You can simply ask them if they’re satisfied after delivering the solution or gather feedback using a customer satisfaction survey.

By successfully moving through these five steps of customer interactions, companies can create positive outcomes. 

Examples of customer interaction (Closing):

• “Thank you for your business! Are you satisfied with the interaction today?”

• “Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Are you happy with the outcome of our conversation?”

Note: How you choose to engage with your customers will depend on the type of customer service interaction, and its success will reflect on your customer satisfaction scores.

Types of customer service interactions

There are different types of customer interactions that require slightly different approaches:

• Requests: Customers may ask for new features or functionalities or to build something from scratch. You need to check the feasibility of the request and accordingly communicate with the product team or let customers know about the possible solutions you can offer. If they request something your company is already working on, you may want to let them know when they can expect an update.

• Questions: Customers may not understand some part of the business and may need clarity about your services or policies. New customers may have a lot of questions at the time of onboarding. Make sure you share relevant resources with them to make the most of your services and even deploy a chatbot or self-service portal for quick answers.

• Complaints: Customers may contact you to find a fix when they encounter an issue. Unhappy customers may even share negative word-of-mouth about their poor experience. Complaints are more urgent and sensitive than compliments, so they should be handled faster and by well-trained customer support agents.

• Compliments: Positive customer interactions may include praise by your customers to let you know they appreciate your business and are happy with your services. Your loyal customer base may leverage your referral system and become your brand advocates. Prioritize these customers and ensure you deliver personalized experiences for them.

Now that you understand that your customer interactions may differ based on the type of customer or interaction. Let’s look at how we can build a customer interaction strategy.

How to build a customer interaction strategy

If you offer omnichannel customer support, you should develop and amplify the customer interaction strategy to ensure consistency across every interaction. One important piece of a strategy is enabling the support team. It’s impossible to achieve success in customer interactions without securing buy-in from well-trained employees. You can follow the below 4 steps to build a robust CIM strategy.

#1 Create a training plan for customer interactions

Create a plan: Your support agents are the customer-facing team that manages the majority if not all of the customer interactions. That's why you need to train your support team. Understand the skills that are important for customer success. Develop a list of competencies you’ll need to train your reps for. What are the common situations that your team encounters during customer interactions?

Practice: Once you’ve gone through core skills, create roleplay situations for your team to practice their skills and receive feedback. Ensure every interaction includes the five steps of the customer interaction cycle for full marks.

Assess: Identify areas for improvement for each employee and provide ongoing support and training. Improve and develop skills over time through quality assurance and interaction reviews.

#2 Segment your customers

One thing to consider when building this strategy is that it will serve many customers. Here’s how we recommend you segment your customer base:

New customers: These customers are new to the company, but they have made their first purchase already.

Existing customers: These customers have been in a relationship with your business for some time.

Past customers: These customers have purchased in the past but are no longer buying from your business.

Prospects: These are a set of potential customers who need more information before making a purchase decision.

Segmenting your customers makes it possible to route them to different teams specializing in understanding and serving each group. Let’s look at how we can use customer segments to encourage personalized customer interactions.

#3 Encourage personalized customer interactions

When developing a customer interaction strategy, it might be tempting to put scripts and checklists in place for your agents to follow. But customers don’t want to feel like they are only a cog in the system - they want to feel like they are treated as humans. A script will only make agents complacent and restricted in what they can do to connect and make a good impression on the customer.

With every stage in the customer interaction cycle, there’s an opportunity to personalize the response and build a relationship with the customer. Use the customer’s name when greeting them. Empathize with their situation while you understand what they need. Propose a thoughtful solution, one that anticipates any other needs they might have.

Client interaction might sound like a formal business process, and it can be. But it doesn’t have to mean abandoning your brand personality when you interact with customers. Don’t think of it as a script but as a framework for more valuable customer interactions.

#4 Develop a multichannel interaction strategy

The number of communication channels is ever-increasing, and in today’s connected culture, customers expect you to deliver a better customer experience than their last interaction. That’s why it is important to have a multichannel customer interaction strategy. Allow your customers to initiate interactions across their preferred communication channels. So, it’s best to develop a customer interaction strategy that includes more than one. Your customers may contact you through live chat, social media, email, review sites, SMS, or community forums. While each interaction might look slightly different, they still need to follow the customer interaction cycle, adapted for the format of where you are interacting.

It might not be possible to resolve every issue on every channel. For example, social media interactions are often public, making them inappropriate for conversations around subscription billing and product pricing. You may move your customer to a more secure, private channel to deliver what they need. However, don’t move customers unnecessarily. If you can close the interaction on the same channel the customer initiated their question on, it’s much easier for everyone.

#5 Develop a multichannel interaction strategy

Chatbots can save you both time and money by directing customers to relevant pages and answering frequently asked questions. Operating much like a vetting service, chatbots are a customer interaction service that can filter through customer interactions and determine which need to be attended by a member of staff. By utilizing customer data, you can analyze which problems, or pain points, in the customer journey are most common and program chatbots to recognize these topics. 

You can also program chatbots to recognize multiple languages, automatically improving your customer interactions for non-English speaking customers. Where previously you would have needed to employ bilingual staff, if a chat bot is able to perform the role at no extra cost, the upfront price of investing into new tech can save you money in the long run. 

#6 Use feedback to inform your interactions

When interacting with customers, pay attention to what they say and how they respond. Whether it’s directly asking for feedback in the form of a questionnaire or recognizing trends in customer interactions, there are multiple ways to help you understand how your customers feel. While not every interaction will be actionable, you can use a broad collection of data to inform future decisions. 

For example, if you find that you get better click through rates (CTR) on your emails when you use less technical terms, it could be an indication that your audience isn’t as informed as you first thought. If you suspect this could be the case, you could experiment with the language you use in your interactions.

If you’re unwilling to completely change tact, why not try A/B tests? Following on from the previous example, split your email audience in two and measure the differences in interaction between an email that uses technical language and an email that uses simplified language.