3 Ways to Improve Your Online Business Customer Interactions

As an increasing number of businesses build an online presence to market their brand more widely and better serve their customers, it becomes more important than ever to stand out from the crowd. Not only do businesses need to improve their physical business, they must also strive to improve their online customer interactions. Online interactions with potential and existing customers are just as important as interactions over the phone or in-person.

Here is how you can do better and boost your customer retention through online interactions.

Respond Faster

Customers who contact your business online expect a timely response because of the instantaneous nature of digital communication. Facebook’s Messenger even rewards businesses for responding to messages quickly with a badge on their profile that showcases their fast response rate. Make quick responses a top priority. You can accomplish this by hiring a dedicated social media manager, expanding your customer service team, outsourcing the task, increasing the use of mobile devices among your team, and more. If your business does not have the capacity to always respond so fast, you can consider implementing options like a live chat powered by AI.

Expand Available Contact Methods

Another improvement you can make is to offer more ways for customers to contact you. For example, if your business only has a phone number and physical address, you can open an e-mail account for customers to contact, implement a live chat option, invite customers to contact you through social media and more. You can even contact customers with text messages to remind them of appointments, inform them of sales and more through a service like Text Request. Customers like having the flexibility to contact you via the method most comfortable for them, so make sure to have many options available! By expanding your available contact methods, you will be able to better meet your client’s needs.

Avoid Canned Responses

Canned responses are easy to make, but can have a negative impact on customer retention. One thing many customers hate is when they contact online customer service, wait twenty-four hours or more for a response, and then receive a copy-and-pasted reply from your FAQ that doesn’t actually answer their question. Instead, strive to respond to each message individually. Take the time to read, understand and address the exact issue or concern the customer is having. Customers will appreciate this personalized interaction and be more pleased and less frustrated with how your business has responded to them. This practice will actually save time in the long-run because there will be fewer messages exchanged over a certain issue.

Businesses have to keep getting better at their online interactions with their customers because digital interactions will be the norm going forward. Always be looking for ways to improve your business operations and especially your customer service practices. Be sure to ask your customers how you can improve your customer service offerings as well. By doing this, you will be sure to be able to adjust your business in the way it needs to in order to meet your customer’s needs.