When developing a customer communication strategy, what is the most worthwhile investment?
When organizations start scaling support channels, there comes a point when there arises a need for a proper strategy to scale the communication as well. Without that, the quality of your customer communication may drop, and that would be quite unpleasant in the bigger picture.
In order to develop a proper strategy for customer communication, there are certain factors that come into play which can determine the path best suited for your needs.
The first step would be to figure out which particular communication mix they want – which can then be built up, organised, and implemented.
And that’s only a part of the work done.
When it comes to actually getting things off the ground, there are still a few hurdles to jump across.
This is when you start thinking of modalities and channels. Under channels, you will think of the channels you can safely let go of, or perhaps the number of times you allow a customer to reach out to you.
The only problem with this school of thought, is that it could actually be detrimental to the goal you are setting out to achieve – which is to offer great support, consistently.
What better way, then?
Research from Forrester, and the Bruce Temkin Group consistently show that most positive customer scores are based on providing them with the most direct path to ‘getting what they came for’.
This ‘getting what they came for’, though quite intangible, is an easy marker to figure out which your most important investment should be. For instance, someone googling ‘Year of Battle of Plassey’ probably doesn’t want to click on more than one link to find the answer. In terms of Google helping the searcher ‘get what they came for’ just the year will do. Which in turn means that depending on context, Google can invest in AI that helps its users reach that goal faster.
So, which is your most worthwhile investment?
The correct answer to this is to let your customers decide. Pay attention to, and gather data, about what exactly it is that your customers are looking for when they come to each of your channels.
Figure out the context of these interactions, and then calculate which of these can be safely let go of without angering customers or even without them noticing. This will tell you what is important for them, and perhaps even tell you what’s critical.
