Whether your customer is coming to you with a problem or just a general query, it’s important to help them feel heard and understood. Understanding customers is key to good customer experience.
Most customer support orgs are continually dreaming up and refining how to reach their customers authentically, strategically, and beneficially. And for good reason, you want to be working hard to keep your customers around. In fact, 65% of a business’s profits come from existing customers. Why? Because these customers believe in and trust the products and/or services these companies offer.
There’s a lot to it and there are many strategies and techniques you can adopt to increase customer appreciation and retention. Below, we’ll highlight the best practices and tools for engaging customers to help them feel valued during any touchpoint with your business.
Ways to Engage With Your Customers to Make Them Feel Valued
There are many ways your organization can go about making customers feel valued. Tactics vary depending on whether your business is in the B2B or B2C space.
It’s a lot easier to implement customer appreciation strategies when you’re working on a product that is directly impacting a person, it’s harder when it’s a business (but still possible!). Here are a few tips for how to make a customer feel understood.
Find Out What’s Helping Customers
One of the best ways to make customers feel heard, understood, and appreciated is by asking them for feedback. When you ask customers for feedback you’re letting them know that their opinion matters to you and that you want to take their input into consideration.
The best place to find out what’s helping customers is at the end of every interaction they have with your business. This is as easy as including a CSAT survey asking how satisfied a customer is with their interaction or asking if their interaction was helpful.
Build Trust Through Support
The majority of customer interactions come in the form of customer support needs.
Customers will always have questions about how to use a product or service and businesses need to be able to meet their needs right when they need them. Being accurate and fast in responses can help build trust,
If your customers are running into issues when trying to get their questions answered then you need to consider ways to make the process easier. Here is where leveraging your knowledge base with the right tech could make a difference.
With the help of customer support AI, you can deflect incoming customer support questions with technology that understands the intent and sentiment of the incoming question. Customers no longer have to interact with a chatbot that will only send them into a support death loop that repeatedly asks them to ask again. Setting up processes that actually help customers enables you to build trust and keep customers loyal. AI has come a long way and can now make the customer support process more rewarding by answering questions with confidence set by the user.
Engage When Customers Need It
There’s so much to be done to meet customer needs, and in order to continue building trust you need to engage with your customers whenever they need it, wherever they need it.
This means ensuring that you have self-serve options available 24/7 or that you have SLAs in place that will help respond to incoming emails and chats as soon as possible. If you treat every customer this way in a consistent manner, it’s more likely they’ll be a repeat one. After all, the chance of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, compared with only 5-20% for a new lead, says this report.
Aside from enabling better automated chat support, you can utilize technology such as AI to help improve the omnichannel support experience by allowing for handoffs between automated chat and live chat with an agent. Customers hate having to repeat their information and you can show them you care about their feelings by enabling a better solution. Value your customers and show them you care by engaging with them whenever they need it.
Frequently Asked Questions About Making Customer Feeling Understood
Ensuring customers feel valued is one way to build trust, another is to ensure that what you’re doing to value them also allows customers to feel understood at every touchpoint they have with a business.
How Do You Make a Customer Feel Valued?
The best way to make a customer feel valued is by implementing processes that enable them to feel valued. The top three ways to show customers you value them is to ask for feedback, build trust, and engage. When you engage when customers need it, then your customers will feel like you value their time. By asking for feedback, a business helps customers feel like their opinion matters. And when you build trust with great customer support, you amaze customers and entice them to come back.
What Is the Importance of Making Customers Feel Valued?
The importance of making customers feel valued is shown by their impact on your bottom line. Customers are the bread and butter of a business and without them, a business doesn’t exist. Make your customers feel valued and understood in order to keep them around. It costs nearly 5-7x as much to gain a new customer than it does to retain one.
How Do You Make A Customer Feel Welcome?
The best way to make a customer feel welcome is to show them you care, show them they’re valued, and show them that their needs are understood. You do this by engaging with customers when they need it, building trust, and implementing the right tools and processes that will allow for the kind of customer experience that amazes customers and keeps them coming back to a business.
Move Forward With AI
AI is the future of customer support. Interested in learning more about how AI can transform your CX?
