In any kind of business, listening to your customers is key to helping your business run smoothly. If you are not providing them with what they want, then you are not going to improve your customer satisfaction levels and retain your clientele. While listening to your customers is very important, you also need to make sure that you are communicating effectively with them.
In this blog post, we are going to discuss why effective communication with customers is so important. Keep reading to find out more about this.
Communicating Negative Information
When something goes wrong in your business, you often think the last thing you want to do is tell your customers about it. These are the people that you are trying to impress, and you want them to believe that everything is going smoothly at all times. However, you will find that sometimes, communicating negative information about your business is very important.
If you were to ignore the issues and not communicate effectively with your customers, then you will see the knock-on effect of this sooner than you think. They would rather know everything that they need to about a situation and they are probably going to find out regardless of whether you tell them or not. It is important to look outside of your business to understand what the potential impact on your customer may be. Yes maybe a late delivery good be bad for them and you really don’t want to be the one giving the information, however imagine you had provided it and ultimately the customer was expecting the delivery as you had indicated, but then hadn’t had time to make changes to other activities that were relying on your delivery.
It is very important that you never lie to your customers as this is only going to ruin the relationship even further and they will no longer trust your company as a whole. This is why effective communication with customers is so important.
Say For Example…
Many of us encounter poor communication every single day from companies who have slightly missed the mark. This is why we have put together an example of something that could be true to us all and impact us in business or pleasure, when a company could have simply communicated much more effectively to have customers who were happy to use their service again.
One example of this could be when you are waiting on a flight. Airports can be very stressful, and everyone is just waiting around for their flight to be called. No one wants to have to deal with a delayed flight but sometimes it happens, and we all have to deal with it. Of course, when this does happen, we expect to be notified about the delay and be given some information about when the new flight time might be.
So, what would happen if the airline did not communicate effectively in this situation? Many customers would be sitting around, getting agitated wondering if their flight would ever take off. Not to mention other stresses that the airline is not aware of. The solution would be to make an announcement with the new flight time and an explanation of why the flight is delayed. With no information being given, customers are kept in the dark and they tend to become more annoyed at the airline as time goes on. Have you experienced this; how did you feel?
What Does This Teach Us?
In the delayed flight example, it is clear that effective communication with customers was not up to scratch. The customers were annoyed, and some might end up booking flights with other airlines in the future down to a simple lack of communication which could cost the airline more than it needed.
When there are issues that are going to affect our customers, we need to ensure that we focus on not only our quality of products or services, but also in the overall quality of how we manage those activities, which clearly includes effective communication. Of course, it is important to wait to pass on any details until you are clear yourself on what is going on.
When you communicate effectively with your customers, you prevent or at least minimise dissatisfaction and you can hope that by being honest upfront that the customer will use your services again. You cannot improve your customer service if you cannot admit to your mistakes and show your customers that you are trying to fix the issue. Remember we all make mistakes from time to time and often they are out with our control, but we must learn from these mistakes and first owning up to them is the starting point.
Make sure that you are managing any issues in the right way and that you communicate effectively with your customers. This way, you’ll maintain your reputation and you can show that you can be trusted. Make sure to get in touch if you need some assistance on this issue.