Stop for a minute and do not thick about your product. You have worked hard enough to be confident in its quality. But your products will remain in stock and services will not be wanted without a respective service level. How to establish communication with customers right from the start?
1. Ensure a regular request flow
Your first priority is to make the lead flow stable and continuous. Further efforts lose their meaning without requests.
1. Use all available promotion channels: get leads via e-mail, social media, contextual advertising, and targeted advertising. If you want users to leave their contacts, give them something valuable in return — a discount, a special offer, a free product, or a tester.
2. Analyze the sales funnel and think through each step of working with a customer. How can you interest a user? What claims will you have to manage? How can you encourage a customer to go to the next funnel step? A CRM system, for example, amoCRM or Bitrix24, will be convenient to track sale processes.
3. Test advertisements, try various audiences, narrow them, and create a portrait of your target customer. You will have to make it as detailed as possible — the better you know your customers, the better you will elaborate on their pain points and claims and the easier it will be to sell a product or a service.
2. Combine several communication channels into a single structure
One customer likes to talk on the phone. Another is conservative and prefers e-mail. The third one is always in messengers and would rather chat in WhatsApp. There is a wide range of communication channels now, and you will have to keep up, otherwise your customers will leave you for your competitors that are more convenient to communicate with.
Therefore, combine communication methods relevant to your customers into a multichannel contact center. You should take into account that messengers take precedence in the world these days. According to Deloitte, they were the most popular applications in the world in 2019.
3. Optimize your work through automation
Customers do not care whether you are working or on break. They want to get answers to their questions late at night or right in the workplace. While your business is just developing, expenses for a 24/7 contact center will hardly be worth it. Therefore, it is necessary to automate customer support and request processing.
But how to automate sales? Messengers offer the simplest way to do it. There are at least five tools.
- Set up automatic responses. They are short messages that automatically greet customers who text you. You can use them to specify the working hours of operators and inform customers on the time your employees are going to be available.
- Develop a self-service menu. It is an equivalent of IVR telephony for messengers. A customer selects the desired item and receives an automatic response with information on the question of interest.
- Create a chatbot. It is a more complicated mechanism of automatic responses, that is based on identifying keywords in customer’s messages. A chatbot can inform users on the product cost, describe services, or send addresses of nearby stores.
- Write scripts. Your developers or OmniOmni’s employees can implement extended program scenarios. For example, scripts can analyze images or receive information from external servers.
- Run sales funnels. It is not just a way to communicate with a customer. It is a sales tool. Having subscribed to the funnel, a customer receives automatic useful messages that warm them and bring them to a sale.
4. Collect statistics and analyze results
Business likes specifics. In order to stay afloat, you will have to thoroughly look into the processes of sales and marketing. A well-thought-out analytics system can become a competitive advantage:
- You will figure out what channels are the most efficient and enhance them.
- You will take communication between operators and customers under control.
- You will make automation more efficient.
- You will improve your service, leading to more sales — according to PWC, 86 % of buyers are ready to pay more for high-quality service.
What can you analyze? First ask your customers for feedback. OmniOmni has the relevant quality survey function. When the chat is finished, the customer will receive a message proposing to evaluate the operator’s work. So, if something is wrong, you will be able to promptly respond and rectify the situation.
In addition to subjective indicators, there are objective ones as well. End-to-end analytics will show them. This method combines sales channels and demonstrates how resources are spent. Such services as Google Analytics will become indispensable helpers in building end-to-end analytics. You can integrate the chat center with them in your OmniOmni account.
Spend consciously
A new startup requires labor contribution and cash investment. It is also important to distribute resources correctly. Do not save on product quality and service level. They are the cornerstone of success. Think through a system of communication with customers. Then buyers will return, bringing new ones, and your expenses will be well worth it.
