In other words, if you know how to manage customer interactions properly, you also know how to convert existing customers into loyal customers who will be brand advocates and help you build stability and success for your business.
Thus, it is important to define what is customer interaction management, how it works, and why is control important to customer interactions - all these questions are the topic of today’s post.
Let’s start from the beginning.
What is customer interaction?
Customer interaction is any connection between your company and customer, including all possible communication channels, touchpoints, and all stages of customer journey. In fact, customer interaction isn’t only about communication or conversation - a purchase without contacting your sales representatives is also a customer interaction.
Customer interactions aren’t always initiated by customers themselves, you can also generate customer interactions proactively by reaching out to your clients in order to collect customer feedback, conduct customer surveys, offer your products and services, and so on. But in most cases, customers initiate customer interactions on their own.
What is customer interaction management?
Customer interaction management is defined as the totality of practices and methods used to manage customer interactions through different contact channels and on different platforms to reach business goals.
In most cases, the most efficient way to do customer interaction management is to pick up a customer interaction management system, which has to either be integrated with your contact center software or have its functionality included in the contact center solution.
Customer interaction management (CIM) will never be effective unless you implement an omnichannel communication model because recent studies show that customers are no longer willing to tolerate single-channel customer service.
For instance, over 66% of customers said that they are not likely to purchase from a brand that offers a single-channel buying experience. What is even more representative is the study that shows that over 98% of American consumers switch between devices and platforms a few times per day and they expect the same quality of customer service and customer experience from the brand regardless of the channel they use to interact with it.
What is meant by customer interaction management?
You can improve your customer interaction management by providing following improvements for the quality of customer service:
- Reduce average wait time - one of the most frustrating aspects of customer service is long wait times , which means the reduction of average waiting time is a crucial goal for any business when it comes to customer interaction management;
- Reduce on-hold wait time - another frustrating issue with customer service is when customers are put on hold for a long time, so try to eliminate this issue as effectively as possible;
- Provide omnichannel customer service - customers hate to repeat themselves during customer interactions, so offering omnichannel customer support is the only way to ensure data synchronization between various departments and communication channels;
- Provide personalized customer service - customers expect personalized service, which means you have to enhance the effectiveness of data synchronization and collection and provide your employees with comprehensive and simple access to customer data during client interactions;
- Be proactive - proactive customer service is a great way to improve customer satisfaction and decrease the risks of customer complaints, yet it also depends on your ability to collect and analyze huge amounts of data;
- Reduce call transfers - another issue that destroys the customer experience and creates angry customers is call transferring - the situation where customer service agents transfer the call to another agent, which often also means that the customer has to wait in the line and repeat the issue again to the new agent;
- Lack of customer feedback awareness - customers often complain about the fact that business ignores their feedback and do nothing to improve their experience. In fact, such issues relate to all companies, but some of them just do nothing - and this is the frustrating factor for horrifying 81% of customers.
- Provide consistent customer experience - this is not only about customer service, but also about such basic things as syncing data between mobile app and website, for instance, customers often complain about the fact that they don’t get their shopping cart synchronized between the mobile application and the website, which means they have to find the same products once again.
Why does customer interaction management matter?
Improved customer experience
80% of customers are ready to quit relationships with your business after a few negative experiences. Thus, managing customer expectations and maintaining a positive customer experience is a crucial task for any business that is willing to win a competitive advantage. What is customer experience, by the way? It is how customers evaluate their customer interactions with your brand - therefore, by managing customer interactions in the right way, you can improve customer experience with all the benefits it offers for you.
Positive customer experience has a positive impact on numerous aspects of your business, including customer loyalty, customer lifetime value, and brand advocacy. On the other hand, one negative customer experience can cost you a customer, so being aware of the importance of customer experience is the first step in building trustful relationships with customers.
High customer retention
It is no matter to say that customer retention is a vital business objective as customer retention allows you to generate sales on the current customer base without spending tens of thousands of dollars on customer acquisition which often shows poor performance and effectiveness. High customer retention is the key to business success and stability, as retained customers build your customer base and become loyal customers who can generate repeat purchases and bring you new buyers with the power of mouth marketing.
Nevertheless, high customer retention is impossible without appropriate customer interaction management methods, which means you have to pay more attention to this aspect of your business. The key to ensuring customer retention lies in hearing customer feedback, addressing customer concerns, and providing fast and quality service when it is needed.
Enhanced customer loyalty
Customer loyalty is the factor that can help your business win the competition and move to another stage of business development because loyal customers are those who stay with the company even during the toughest times - imagine dealing with the consequences of COVID-19 if you have had no loyal customers who were ready to support your business.
Thus, building customer loyalty requires you to offer not only a competitive advantage to your customers but also being able to offer something absolutely unique to them, that would make you look the best from their point of view. Handling customer interactions as nobody else is a good way to find this unique characteristic that would become the game changer - so customer interaction management system is a great choice when it comes to ensuring customer loyalty.
Higher customer lifetime value
It won’t be a lie to say that the key business goal of any organization is to earn more money. Thus, everything that increases profits is good for your business, and as we have mentioned above, customer interaction management is a good way to improve customer experience, customer retention and build customer loyalty - all these three factors combined have a positive impact on customer lifetime value, which is the business metric that shows how much money each customer brings up to your business during his or her customer journey. \
Positive customer experiences ensured by the proper customer interaction management motivate customers to stay with the company for long periods of time, which means more purchases and more opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling, which results in higher profits. Higher customer lifetime value is a goal for any business as it helps to generate more money from existing customers without allocating resources to it.
What are the examples of customer interactions?
There are numerous customer interaction examples and types, but let’s look at the most common ones:
Purchases
The most common and the most important type of customer interaction to manage is a purchase. Purchases can be processed without even contacting the sales team, or they can include communication with sales reps, yet the nature of this customer interaction remains the same - it is a purchase of your product on one of your digital channels. The goal of a company is to manage any customer interaction with potential customers or even current customers in the way that would push them to complete a purchase.
Questions
When we said that any customer interaction should be managed in a way that increases the chance of following a purchase, we meant customer questions as well. When customers come up to you with questions about your products or services, you can either handle such customer interaction with the use of all the best practices and tips to provide seamless customer experience, or to use this conversation as a sales opportunity - for instance, when potential customers start asking questions about the product, you can try to convince them to purchase the product here and now by using some sales tricks.
Complaints
Another common type of customer interaction that requires proper customer interaction management is complaint handling. Customer complaints happen everywhere and always, and they can have different causes - but regardless of that, your purpose is to resolve those complaints as soon as possible in order to make sure that the high level of customer satisfaction will be provided for each of such customer service interactions. The effectiveness of customer complaints resolution depends not only on your ability to resolve the issue, but on Average Resolution Time (ART) - the vital metric that measures the average time spent on resolving customer issues.
Feedback
Customer interactions also happen when you have to collect customer feedback or, which happens rarer, when customers come up with their feedback proactively. This is an important part of customer interaction management as collecting feedback is the way to identify imperfections in your service or product, and also this is a good way to build trustful and transparent communication with clients. Your goal is to make sure that the feedback you collect will be used for measurable improvement of customer satisfaction and customer experience in general, or otherwise, there is no sense in collecting feedback at all.
Where do customer interactions happen?
Phone calls
Phone calls are the most common form of customer interaction when it comes to customer service or sales as this contact channel offers speed and a personal touch that is unreachable for other communication channels. Nonetheless, the trend is that phone calls are losing their value as the main customer service channel and younger target audiences are shifting towards text communication channels.
A formal communication channel has one great advantage - it doesn’t require an immediate response from either the customer or the customer service agent. This makes business communication more comfortable and less urgent than in the case of other communication channels. Also, emails are used as the main channel for marketing efforts.
Text channels
This includes both web chat, chatbots (as self-service channels), and messengers. Text channels are the new trend in customer-brand communication as they offer customers who hate personal phone communication an option to communicate directly with customer service reps without the need to use voice. Nevertheless, different channels are used for different purposes - sales, customer service, self-service options, and so on.
Social media
Social media channels are also highly popular, especially among young people, and include such popular platforms as Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, LinkedIn, etc. All these channels are used for customer service purposes and also as platforms for generating warm leads both through organic search results and by using paid advertising.
Video calls
Video calls aren’t very popular yet among customers as a customer service channel, nevertheless, they can be used as a contact channel during sales presentations or similar activities that relate to sales process. Moreover, we can bet that in the near future, video conferencing will become more popular than it is now, and also as a customer service channel.
How to choose customer interaction management software?
A customer interaction management system is a tool that enables you to do customer interaction management from a single interface, with a single source of data regarding all important operations, and with the assistance of all needed tools and options required to provide exceptional customer experience during every single customer interaction.
What does such a customer interaction management (CIM) system look like? Well, as we have already mentioned above, for improved efficiency and performance, you should look for (CIM) customer interaction management solutions that are either integrated with contact center software, or which are contact center software with all necessary functionality included.
Our solution - Voiptime Cloud Contact Center - is exactly what you need. It is a full-fledged customer interaction management system that offers your omnichannel communication platform with absolute data synchronization, advanced analytics, call scripts, intelligent call routing capabilities, third-party software integration options (including built-in CRM(Customer Relationship Management) software integration), and other functionalities that make customer interaction management easy and efficient even for newbie agents.
If you don’t want to waste your time, then order demo and our sales team will contact your soon!
