Last Updated: April 2024
Are you struggling to interact with your customers? If yes, you are not alone. Most of the companies end up providing a bad customer service experience to their customers.
Customer interaction plays a huge role in building influential connections with customers and retaining them. And personnel with efficient communication skills are key to making customer interaction positive and productive.
As per research, for 73% of consumers, friendly employees or customer support representatives are what makes a memorable experience and cause consumers to stay loyal to the brand.
So it seems crucial for you and your customer service personnel to know how to talk to customers positively and efficiently.
In this post, we will walk you through:
- 8 proven ways to interact with customers positively
- Some customer interaction examples to consider
- Best customer interaction platforms
8 Proven Ways to Interact With Customers Positively
The following are 8 proven ways through which you can make every interaction with customers productive:
1. Show Empathy And Gratitude
Empathy and gratitude are the best of the many qualities inculcated in us right from our childhood. These same qualities go a long way while interacting with your potential customers too.
Show your gratitude towards them since they showed interest in your company. Also, try to put yourself in their shoes and empathize with them to understand what they are trying to convey.
2. Appreciate Customers
Always try to appear sincere in your approach and ensure that you understand what the customer is trying to convey. Make sure that you lend all ears to what the customer is trying to convey. Your customer should feel that they are part of two-way communication. Also, try to have an active listening approach and be patient.
In the process, never miss a moment to appreciate customers wherever necessary. However, make sure that it doesn’t cross the innate line of flattery.
3. Be Proactive
Being proactive is the same as thinking two steps ahead and always being aware of the issues that customers might face in the future. You need to have a proactive approach while interacting with your customers.
Also, ask as many questions as possible to better understand their requirements. Once you get a clearer view of their needs, suggest ways by which you can help them out.
According to Helpama, around 83% of customers expect the customer service to be proactive in their approach.
4. Empower Your Customer Service Team
Your customer service team is the face of your business as they interact with your customers directly..
To serve the customers fully, they would be required to make decisions and take actions.
If your customer service team is not empowered enough, your customers may end up having a bad customer service experience. In Helplama’s survey, 50% of respondents who ended a commercial relationship cited unskilled support representatives as a cause of action.
Empowering your customer service team with proper knowledge and authority will allow them and motivate them to effectively interact with the customers.
If required, you should take the lead and help them improve their overall customer interaction skills by making them go through proper training. Always try to keep them inspired, in turn, making them deliver the best possible result.
Tip: Conduct workshops and practice communication skills by making them indulge in hypothetical situations.
5. Empower Your Customers
Allow your customer to take action and perform basic tasks on their own, so they need to contact customer support every time they need help with something.
Additionally, ask for customer feedback whenever possible. You need to be quick on your feet and try to understand and analyze the various pain points and habits of the customer. Accordingly, you must be able to approach them in an empathetic yet empowering manner. You should assure them on how the task can be done efficiently and how they can put their complete faith in you.
6. Be Transparent
You need to have some level of transparency between you and your customer. You need to put forward what you feel in a respectful yet honest manner. If you are unable to solve their problem at the get-go, tell them. However, ensure them on how you can successfully approach the problem throughout a series of further interactions.
7. Creativity
While interacting with a customer, your grey brain cells should be activated to their maximum potential.
If you would show creativity while interacting with customers, they would be able to distinguish your approach from that of other companies. Make sure to think out of the box and never shy away from attacking the problem in the most unique and unorthodox way possible.
As per Helplama’s survey, 89% of consumers consider buying from brands that show they care about consumer needs.
So, encourage your customer service staff to be creative while interacting with customers.
8. Listen Carefully
You should be all ears during your interaction with the customer. You need to actively listen to them to understand what exactly they are trying to convey.
And most importantly, DO NOT INTERRUPT! It is bad customer service etiquette, and the customer might get annoyed as well.
If you didn’t understand something during the first listen, ask for their permission before you interrupt.
A Few Customer Interaction Examples
In order to better demonstrate positive customer interactions, here are a few examples:
Customer Interactions in Marketing
1. Spotify
You might have noticed people posting Instagram stories of their year-end top artists and songs played through Spotify. The audio streaming giant played well into analyzing the psyche of the human mind. People often tend to take great pride in the music they listen to and want more people to know about that. Spotify gave the audience just that by not only giving them their top 5 artists but also their top 5 albums, genres, songs, and moods.
This genius marketing gimmick first came to action in the year 2019. It has now become an end-of-the-year trend to post your Spotify analytics on your social media to showcase your taste in music.
Spotify played it quite well in understanding this behavioral trait of the audience and implemented the marketing gimmick perfectly:
The Result: According to Twitter, there are around 1.2 million posts of the Spotify wrapped statistics.
2. Getty Museum
In 2020 during the peak of lockdown, Los Angeles’ famous Getty Museum introduced the Getty Museum challenge. In the challenge, people had to come up with innovative homemade ways to design some of the museum’s artworks and post them on their social media handles by tagging them.
The Result: Dozens of users participated in the challenge through Twitter and other social media handles and the campaign went on to be a huge hit. Getty went on to post some of the best user-generated content parallelly with the original ones.
3. Oreo
Oreo came up with an innovative hashtag called the ‘#oreoscope’ to better engage with their audience on Twitter. They were well aware of their target audience’s love for their products and all they had to do was merge it with something else that they love. Apparently, their audience was really into horoscopes as well.
In the campaign, the brand perfectly capitalized on the people’s belief in horoscopes. They came up with the idea to analyze the recent tweets of a user and then accordingly post a personalized #oreoscope of their personality.
The Result: This became a huge hit on Twitter in late 2021 as dozens of users went on to use the hashtag and received their personalized ‘oreoscopes’.
Customer Interactions in Sales
1. T-We Tea
T-We Tea, a tea shop in San Francisco is well-known for reaching out to their customers to show gratitude to their customers. Showing gratitude to customers goes a long way in building a faithful bond with the customers which might eventually result in customer loyalty. The loyal customers would then have a positive word of mouth that would help onboard more customers to your company.
They often go out of their way to keep their customer relations in check by sending sweet messages in the form of notes with their products.
Here is an image of a sweet note sent by T-We Tea to Francesca:
2. Magic Mind
Magic Mind is an energy booster drink that is best known for being the world’s first productivity drink. Apart from this, they are also well known for welcoming new customers by sending them sweet personalized video messages to thank them for their purchase:
Customer Interaction in Customer Service
1. Jetblue
Jetblue, the seventh-largest airline in North America, is often known for its flawless and efficient customer service.
In 2013, Paul Brown happened to have boarded the flight and was unable to get his Starbucks coffee.
He then tweeted the following:
Link to the Twitter thread
Here, JetBlue was not expected or required to reply to the post, but they still did, making it a great example of customer engagement.
2. Tesla
Tesla has managed to build its brand image over the years and has successfully onboarded many happy customers. Part of the reason why they are so successful is their amazing customer service. Instead of waiting for hours in a repair shop, Tesla offers to visit their customer’s homes and offer personalized support.
Have a look at this tweet posted by a satisfied customer of Tesla.
3. Trader Joe
Trader Joe, the grocery store in California made rounds on social media for all the right reasons.
Apparently, a lady was worried that their 89-year-old grandfather wouldn’t have enough groceries stocked up, as he was caught up in a snowstorm. Upon being denied from several grocery stores in the neighborhood, Trader Joe agreed to help them.
The grocery items were delivered to the old man in under 30 minutes free of charge.
The lady went on to post about their experience in the following Reddit forum:
Best Customer Interaction Platforms
A good customer interaction software or Customer Interaction Management (CIM) is something that helps an organization to efficiently assist or hear out what their customers have to say regarding their products or services. Generally, a CIM software is used by agents of a contact centre for interacting with their clients. The software can be used for communication across several channels like telephone, scanned documents, text messages, email and social media platforms.
Here is a list of some of the best customer interaction platforms:
1. Zendesk
Zendesk is a platform that is best known for its user-friendly interface and seamless flow of conversation across all channels. It offers a service known as ‘Agent Workspace’, which allows you to collaborate with your team members and give out fast responses.
Zendesk offers a 14-day free trial in which we can make full use of the Zendesk marketplace by customizing workspace and integrating apps.
2. Freshdesk
Freshdesk is best known as free software that offers features like Ticket routing, native integrations, knowledge base, tracking customer interactions, and automation. It gives you an option to streamline collaboration and automation at a feasible rate.
3. Olark
Olark is best known for offering efficient customer interaction management. It helps in properly arranging customer data in the form of chat transcripts and structured notes. It also keeps a record of your chat insights, so that you can properly analyze your company’s interaction performances.
Olark’s free version has limited features like 20 chats per month and one agent. However, its paid version has features like a customizable chatbox, unlimited chats, multiple agents, and agent groups.
4. Gorgias
Gorgias is a platform that is generally used as a help desk for tending to customers’ complaints and queries. It is mostly used by e-commerce stores to tend to their customer’s needs. This helps in managing all the support and customer services in one place. It has been noted that most Shopify stores use Gorgias to reduce ticket response time and as a result, increase the overall efficiency of their customer service department.
Gorgias is a paid software that according to the monthly plans offers different features like Shopify integrations, Social media platform integrations, unlimited chats, and revenue statistics.
5. Live Chat
Live Chat is one of the most common interaction software. It helps in solving customer’s queries and issues on a real-time basis. We can interact with them and offer them a solution right away. Also, it gives off a sort of human touch, wherein, the customer feels that there is someone who is tending to their needs.
Live Chat offers a free trial for 14 days. After 14 days you can avail the paid version which offers features like unlimited chat history, ticketing system, data security, basic reporting and multiple agent groups
6. Intercom
Intercom is yet another beneficial customer interaction software that helps you in keeping a tab of all the interactions with your customers. It is best known for offering an interaction client phone system through which we can chat with customers through their registered phone numbers.
Intercom offers a free trial for 14 days after which you would have to pay for it on a monthly basis. The paid version offers services like live chat for support, team inboxes, ticketing workflows, service level agreement rules, workload management, role-based permissions, outcome reporting.
7. Pure Chat
Pure Chat is a customer interaction platform that is generally used by small to mid-sized companies to offer live chat features. It also offers a user-friendly interface along with a customizable widget screen and a dashboard filled with unique features.
Pure Chat comes up with a free version that offers unlimited user and unlimited chats across a maximum of 3 devices.
Conclusion
Interacting with your audience and taking their opinions into consideration is one of the key factors for the growth of any company. A happy customer is what a company really needs. They end up spreading positive word of mouth among their social circle and help in onboarding more potential customers.
Now that you are aware of these eight ways to maximize the number of positive customer interactions, go ahead and try them to get the possible results.
But it is not a task that can be completed in a few days, it will take time to learn and implement these habits. Nevertheless, you can always delegate your customer service to Helplama.
Alternatively, you can also consider Saufter if you want to improve the efficiency of your customer service team. It is equipped with automated workflows, market automation, a live chat feature, and much more to improve the productivity of your support team. Furthermore, they also offer customized pricing.
So, what are you waiting for?
