From Instagram to instant purchases at a click of a button, we live in a fast-paced world. And consumers expect to be able to get in touch with companies they do business with quickly.
If they can’t? Well, they’ve got other options.
For this reason, being unavailable is the quickest way to lose potential customers. Being accessible is vital for maintaining and boosting conversions and retention.
Here’s how being available makes you a better choice in the minds of your customers and some best practices you can implement to become more accessible.
Why Availability Helps With Client Retention
We’ve all had the frustrating experience of being put on hold or sent straight to voicemail. No one likes to wait around for a response, and if there’s another option, most of us will just go somewhere else.
Being available and accessible to potential and existing customers will help with conversion and retention for a few reasons:
- It creates a pleasant, streamlined, and simple communication experience.
- It shows you care about your customers.
- It gives a personal and authentic human touch.
Not all companies have the same capacity to offer 24/7 live customer service. But all companies can—and should—prioritize fast and effective communication.
Important Ways to Communicate with Clients
There are so many ways to communicate with prospective or current customers. Whichever communication channels you choose, it’s important that your customers have an easy, efficient way to contact you.
Here are some of the main ways to communicate with clients and their best practices.
Phone
The phone is still the fastest way to contact someone while ensuring clear communication. And if someone is picking up the phone to call, they want a quick response to their inquiry—otherwise, they’re likely to become frustrated or go elsewhere.
Best practices:
- Train staff to answer all phone calls (i.e., no screening) to avoid going to voicemail.
- Get help from a virtual assistant or use virtual office services if you need help keeping up with the volume of calls.
- If a call is missed, set a policy for when to return the call.
- Have simple, clear phone call scripts to best help clients over the phone.
Emails can be a great way to communicate, but the sheer volume often leaves businesses having a hard time keeping up in a timely manner.
But not responding to emails—or responding late—is a surefire way to lose prospective customers.
Best practices:
- Triage emails into important, urgent, and non-urgent. Then, set and keep a standard response time for each category.
- Use email templates to help respond quickly. Just make sure to personalize and customize them so they don’t come across as cold or robotic.
- Set up automatic replies during out-of-office hours or when you’re experiencing high volume to let customers know of other ways to get in touch with you.
Contact Form
A contact form is what customers can fill out on a website to submit a comment or inquiry. The benefit of a contact form over simply directing them to email you is that you can dictate fields to collect important information (e.g., “how did you hear about us?”).
Best practices:
- Treat contact form inquiries like regular emails—follow a standard response time and use customizable template responses.
- Periodically check to ensure your website’s contact form is syncing with your email address.
- Make your contact form simple, short, and easy to use.
One issue, though? Contact forms often get spammed, so it’s important that you sift through the junk to find the important stuff.
Web Chat
Live chat support is very effective for customers who need to troubleshoot a problem or have multiple questions. It can be done either with real humans (your team) or AI-assisted chats that use algorithms to provide responses.
Best practices:
- Use real human support in the chat whenever possible! While AI these days is good, it can’t provide the same genuine, authentic connection.
- If you do use AI, make sure that it’s set up to respond to simple, basic questions only. If there’s anything complicated, direct the customer to call you instead (and have someone answer the call!).
Social Media
Social media is an awesome way to connect with customers and provide valuable information—we have a whole guide on using Instagram reels to promote your small biz. But it’s also another way for customers to contact you. They might reach out via Instagram DMs (direct message), Facebook messages, or public tweets (Twitter) that mention you, for example.
Best practices:
- DMs and messages can be treated like emails as they’re private between the customer and business.
- Any public mention (i.e., tweets or @ mentions) should have a response policy to ensure they’re in line with your company brand and values.
Voicemail
It’s always preferable that customers get ahold of someone right away—never sending another caller directly to voicemail is one of the main reasons to use virtual office services! But sometimes voicemails are inevitable, so at least ensure there’s a quick, professional response.
Best practices:
- Keep your message short and let them know when they can expect to hear back.
- Set a response time for voicemails.
- Provide responses to common questions by setting up an interactive voice response (“Press 1 for information on our products, press 2 for information about store hours”).
How To Improve Availability and Communication
For most companies, increasing communication comes down to resources and capacity. Many small and medium-sized businesses simply don’t have the staff to cover phones all day. But even if your team is at its capacity, there are some effective ways to be more available to clients:
- Get a virtual office services membership. It’s a great solution to expand the capacity of your business through mail forwarding services and personalized call answering services.
- Employ a virtual assistant to support you with administration and communication tasks like emails, phone calls, voicemail responses, or social media monitoring.
- Set up systems and processes to streamline what you’re already doing. Email templates, phone call scripts, and delegating tasks can all help your team work more efficiently to respond to incoming inquiries.
To stay competitive, you need to be available and responsive to customers. It comes down to prioritizing being available through timely communication and efficient systems. By doing this, you’ll increase conversions and retain customers.
Want to become more accessible to your customers? The Post’s virtual office services can help ensure your customers always have someone to speak to when they call your business. Contact us today to learn more.