Communication is the foundation of better customer service.
Not all content is created equal. From your user’s perspective, your content (whether through a support team or self-help content) either serves to communicate value, or add confusion. Ask yourself; “Does our support team communicate solutions well to customers? Does our content communicate clear, helpful answers to people searching for it?”
We make or break customer experience from these two questions of communication.
The best answers to those two questions of communication are — you guessed it — well-developed content. We've talked about the inseparable relationship between customer experience and employee experience, specifically noting that content makes that connection.
How does better communication strengthen this relationship and provide a foundation for better communication between customers, employees, and your organization?
Communicate Through Content
It all starts with content that’s purposeful. In the billions of pages of content that populate the internet, we don’t have to tell you that far too much of it isn’t helpful. Fluff brings frustration, purpose brings proficiency. And it’s your job to make sure your content communicates something real and helpful to your customers.
Like any relationship, the main ingredient to good customer experience is communication — knowing your customer and delivering the right information in the right way. There are so many different ways to deliver information now that modern organizations need to have content that's ready to be deployed across several different mediums. To provide the best possible content experience to your customers, all that information has to be up-to-date and consistent.
That doesn't happen magically. You need content operations and information architecture that facilitates the flow of information to your customers and between internal departments. The fact remains that your primary mode of communication to your customers will be through the content you provide them.
Strengthen Your Post-Sale Customer Experience Strategy
The bulk of CX efforts are focused on attracting prospects to become customers (part of me thinks it would be more honest to call it PX for prospect-experience). But by focusing on prospects instead of customers, we actually harm our ability to convert prospects into customers.
People are smart. They’ll check your support site before making any long-term commitments to your product or service; they’ll visit forums, read reviews, and take to social media to get what your content doesn’t provide. What kind of message are they getting about your product?
This is also the time to talk to your customers! Happy customers become proud advocates — which is the best marketing strategy you can ask for. Just because you made the sale doesn’t mean you stop communicating with your customers. This is a prime place to hear their worries, opinions, victories, and blockers. It’s your chance to turn a sale into a relationship. Whether it’s through your content or interpersonal communication, you’re in charge of opening that support channel and cultivating something beyond the dollar sign.
Change Things Up When They Get Stale
Oh yeah, things get stale. We work with technology and human beings. It’d be naive to think that the same strategies will work the same on day one as in year five. The rate that products, customer needs, and internal processes evolve calls for constant scrutiny. Customer experience isn’t a one-and-done spell cast to bewitch people.
This point starts with internal communication. Without internal communication and assessment, outdated CX strategies tend to stay unsuccessfully running in the background; modern organizations need to have a foundation of open communication that will inevitably spur them to adapt to the changing needs of their customers and their organization.
