In building lasting brand loyalty, strong communication is paramount. All it takes is one negative interaction to convince 51% of customers to never do business with a company again.
When the stakes are this high, investing in comprehensive customer communication tools that foster brand loyalty is a no-brainer.
The importance of consistent, on-brand customer communication cannot be stressed enough. According to NewVoiceMedia’s last “serial switchers” report, poor customer communication can cost businesses up to $75 billion annually.
Luckily, there are a number of customer communication tools that can help streamline and optimize your business’ communication strategy.
This article covers the various kinds of customer communication tools your business can employ, as well as go over how you can select the tools best suited for your company.
Key customer communication tools that build brand loyalty
When thinking about which customer communication tools are best for your business, here are a few used by some of the most successful companies.
Communications assistant tools
Proactively addressing your customer messaging with the right communications assistant tools can help alleviate common customer complaints, align the brand’s voice and tone across all employees, and ensure that each customer’s experience with your business is positive—all contributing to the likelihood of establishing long-term brand loyalty.
Top tools in this category:
- Grammarly
- What is it?
- AI-powered digital communications assistant
- Top features
- Tone detector to ensure customer-facing communications meet the expected best practices set by your brand, creating a pleasant experience for the customer no matter which employee they speak to.
- Writing suggestions that ensure all spelling, punctuation, and grammar is accurate and consistent, putting forth a professional and trustworthy brand image.
- Custom style guide to allow customer-facing employees to check their word choice against those guidelines set by your brand.
- What is it?
- Intercom
- What is it?
- Messenger-based customer experience platform
- Top features
- Provides employees with the ability to chat in real-time, follow up later, or create customized automated chatbots.
- Allows employees to proactively address common pain points through targeted outbound messaging, interactive troubleshooting, and self-serve features.
- Integrates with over 250 apps, works across various platforms, and automates ticketing workflows to automatically route and prioritize conversations.
- What is it?
Call center software
To ensure all customer calls are managed within your specified brand guidelines and that scripts are adhered to, be sure you look for software that has premium features that can monitor customer interactions and provide tools to facilitate smooth transitions between departments.
Some of this category’s top tools:
- Freshcaller
- What is it?
- Modern phone system software
- Top features
- Custom greetings, hold times, and wait queues can be set to delight and inform customers while they wait or are redirected.
- Streamlined queue management allows employees to distribute the call load equally and create queue-based routing rules.
- Interactions can be tailored and kept personalized for each customer across employees with the interaction history, call notes, and warm transfer features.
- What is it?
- Nextiva
- What is it?
- Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) cloud-based virtual call center system
- Top features
- Interactive voice response routes customer calls to the right agents.
- A secure app allows employees to work from anywhere from any device.
- Managers can track the entire customer journey with customized dashboards and analytics.
- What is it?
Customer survey tools
Customer survey tools are often crucial for tracking and measuring customer satisfaction at regular intervals, as well as for building a history of customer relations notes into your CRM system. They improve customer communications support by enabling businesses to identify areas of dissatisfaction among customers and improve overall customer satisfaction key performance indicators (KPIs).
A few of the top tools:
- Qualtrics XM
- What is it?
- Customer experience management system
- Top features
- Captures real-time customer feedback from 27 different channels and 128 different sources and funnels into one central platform.
- Includes iQ, a predictive AI engine, that reveals trends, patterns, and key drivers.
- Automatically sends recommendations for responses and actions to the employees best equipped to handle each situation.
- What is it?
- Typeform
- What is it?
- Web-based information collection platform
- Top features
- Offers a wide range of form, survey, and quiz templates that are customizable to suit each business’ needs.
- Includes logic jumps that tailor the forms to the audience.
- Integrates with VideoAsk, Typeform’s asynchronous video feature that allows employees to add a personal touch to the customer survey process.
- What is it?
All of the aforementioned tools can significantly improve customer communication, strengthening the ties your business continuously works to create and maintain each and every day. But all may not be applicable to your business, nor may they fit within your business’ budget, size, and time constraints.
How do you know which tools are the best for your business?
Selecting the right customer communication tools for your business
When thinking about which customer communication tools are right for your business, consider the following questions:
- Which teams can benefit from this tool?
- How many users will there be?
- What are your primary methods of communicating with your customers?
- Is it important for this tool to integrate with other software/platforms?
- Are there certain features that are nonnegotiable?
- What is your business’ budget?
- Are there maintenance costs involved?
- What is the tool’s B2B customer support like?
Answering these questions will help guide you in your decision-making process, allowing you to select the tool that best meets your set criteria.
When framing your decision-making process, think from a higher vantage point. What are your business’ short- and long-term goals, and how does this investment impact those goals? Looking from a macro perspective first can offer better insight into making those more specific decisions. Although they may only directly impact one or a few teams, these decisions do affect your entire organization.
Timing is also a central factor to consider. Is this tool needed immediately or can it be purchased further out? This question will also need to be considered in conjunction with budgetary constraints. Reallocating funds—or ultimately deciding that other items need to take priority—can drastically affect which tool(s) you decide to invest in—if any.
Building a consistent customer experience with Grammarly Business
Many tools do require a significant investment, but tools like Grammarly Business can provide a wealth of value with lower cost barriers and ease of implementation.
This AI-powered writing assistant provides many of the same features as other customer communication tools in one easy-to-use platform. Not only does it provide suggestions for grammar, spelling, and punctuation, but it also analyzes and detects tone to ensure your customer service teams are brand-aligned with your company’s voice, ensuring their experience is always a pleasant one, no matter whom they are speaking to.
Grammarly Business also allows you to introduce a custom style guide that you can share with employees so that they are educated on the company’s specific communication best practices.
You also have access to performance analytics that allow you to review key metrics and optimize your team’s capabilities.
No matter the decision, one thing is clear: Customer communication is key to your business’ ability to endorse and retain brand loyalty, and will need to take precedence when thinking about customer strategies.
Interested in learning more about how Grammarly Business can be your customer communication tool solution? Contact us today or upgrade now.
