Customer Communication: Setting the Right Tone in a Digital Environment

Effectively communicating with customers is essential for success in business. ‘It’s not what you said, but how you said it’ makes perfect sense when we are considering customer service. With rapidly changing customer dynamics, it is vital to pay attention to the way you communicate with people in order to deliver customer service excellence in a highly competitive business environment. Customers today are sensitive to non-verbal cues, gestures and the tone used by representatives. In a digital environment, having the perfect tone becomes even more complicated.  Why is it important to have the right tone and what steps can be taken to achieve it? Here’s a look.

Communicating with Millennial Customers  

With the growing number of millennial customers, we see them heading directly to social media channels of a business for getting in touch along with sharing their reviews with friends and family. To attract a digital savvy generation, such as millennials, businesses need to look at ways to successfully communicate with them. Since many of them prefer text based conversations via social media channels and business apps, it is vital to know how they want you to talk to them.

Understand What They Want

All your efforts are useless if you don’t understand your customer needs. There’s no use of offering a great solution which your customers never needed in the first place. Your perception about the problems customers are facing and the solutions they are looking for might not necessarily be what customers want.

Study the target demographics and consumer behavior before you communicate with them. One of the best things you can do for your target audience is to listen to them, be it an angry customer or a loyal one, if you really want to know your customers then you need to let them rant. Once they have said what they wanted to, respond to them in the manner that they feel connected to your business. Offering a personalized experience which is tailored to the needs of the person you are communicating with is what will set you apart from other businesses and result in happier clients.

Setting the Right Tone

One of the predominant factors that impacts your customers’ perception about your brand is the ‘tone’ of your communication. When a service representative responds to text based queries in a digital environment, customers have no idea of their mood; are they smiling or frowning? More often than not, a straightforward answer may be perceived as rude by customers because they have no verbal cues to understand the mood of the message. This is where the use of emojis comes into play.

Driving Customer Interaction with Emojis

Every time customers contact you, they leave cues for you to understand. By reviewing social media platforms, one of the dominant trends that you will notice is the use of emojis to drive customer-to-customer and customer-to-business interaction. Smart use of emojis is a great way to communicate with your customers. However, opening up communication with an emoji is not recommended before you get an idea of your customer preferences. With an appropriate emoji, not only can you set a tone (?: empathizing with your customer’s situation, ?: exhibiting nice), but it also adds a human voice to the message. A customer using a casual tone and slang is more likely to appreciate an upbeat response with apt emojis, while a formally crafted query should best be answered with a more serious tone.