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Customers often interact and communicate with businesses for various reasons related to marketing, sales, and service support issues.
Such interactions happen throughout the customer journey and give brands an opportunity to connect with customers, understand the needs, and enhance the experience.
Managing customer interactions efficiently is always also the key to increasing retention and advocacy.
60% of consumers say that a good customer experience is important to feel loyalty toward a brand. But good customer experience is not possible unless your company knows how to interact with customers.
There will be different types of interactions across customer journeys and channels, so having the right strategy is essential for customer interaction management.
In this blog, we will discuss customer interactions in detail, understand how to improve customer interaction, and also analyze the importance of customer interaction.
Customer interaction is defined as the process of managing customer interactions across multiple channels and across different stages of the customer sales cycle.
It’s a strategic approach to not only manage client interactions across departments but also maintain cross-functional data synchronization to deliver a better and more personalized customer experience. 
Every business needs to have a customer interaction management in place to serve customers better. The customer interaction cycle consists of 5 stages. They are as follows:
Customer interactions present a great opportunity for businesses to understand their customers and work on their problems to ensure an improved experience. By managing interaction with customers, a business will be able to build a loyal customer base that will be associated for a long time. A business that has a customer interaction model in place can achieve its targets and keep customers happy.
Customer interaction is important for many reasons.
Customer interactions can happen for various reasons and the focus in all situations should always be on how to improve customer experience (CX). All the client interactions can broadly be classified into three categories:
Stabilizing – In the early stage of the relationship, the focus of interactions is to stabilize the customer relationship and make customers aware of the systems and processes in place for taking the relationship further.
Critical – Service encounter interactions belong to the critical category and decide whether customers will have a positive or negative experience for the complaint, question, or a special request they have.
Planned – The purpose of planned interactions is to boost customer profitability through up-selling and cross-selling, and also to let the sales or support team leverage the changes in customer’s purchasing patterns.
Every customer interaction is an opportunity to establish a bond of trust and gain loyalty. A business that takes customer interactions seriously witnesses a positive impact across operations. More so, good customer interactions often form the foundation of higher levels of satisfaction.
Here are some of the ways good interaction with customers can improve your business –
Every customer interaction offers insights into the experience of an individual customer and shows whether or not a customer is happy with the business. It also brings an opportunity to understand the needs and meet those needs, resulting in improved levels of customer satisfaction.
Customer interaction is the best way for a business to become aware of the customer pain points and challenges. When your business knows what concerns customers, it can always take timely steps toward issue resolution. The more customer issues your business resolves, the more positive impact can it witness on the bottom line.
Regular customer interactions are a great chance for employees to know customers better and get familiar with their problems. The more your employees get trained in customer interactions, the more knowledgeable they become which can work as a motivation for them to improve customer service.
When your business interacts with customers regularly, it brings data and provides feedback. The insights gained from interactions together with the feedback can improve operations, resulting in customer-driven procedures and steps.
Customer interactions are vital for winning their loyalty and trust over time. The more you interact with them, the more you are aware of their problems. This is how you can solve their problems and add to their overall experience with your brand, resulting in higher retention rates.
Engaging with your customers is always at the core of building an effective customer interaction strategy. It can help you foster positive relationships over time and successfully meet the needs of your customers. When a business has a customer interaction strategy in place, it removes pain points and achieves happy customers.
Let’s look at the steps involved in building a customer interaction strategy –
Taking steps to understand your customers is the first step toward building a customer interaction strategy. In this step, the focus should be on identifying the target audience, creating detailed personas, and analyzing their needs and behavior.
The purpose of interactions should be clear so that you can make the communication relevant and meaningful. Whether you want to improve satisfaction levels boost retention or drive sales, you need to make clear goals and be in alignment with the business strategy.
Customer interactions should be smooth and seamless and without any hassles. To achieve this goal, it’s important to choose the channels for interactions beforehand and then optimize your business; presence on those channels.
Your business can handle customer interactions effectively when there is a trained and skilled team for the tasks. The team should have in-depth product knowledge, be equipped with the tools and technology, and possess the problem-solving aptitude for interactions.
Make sure your business can interact with customers on the channels of their choice. It’s equally important to let customers make a smooth transition between channels. To achieve this goal, you should consider integrating various channels.
Quick and timely response is one of the cornerstones of customer interactions. You should focus on providing quick support to customers and staying responsive to their needs.
Customers can contact a business for various reasons. The key is always to understand the scenarios where customers choose to interact and be prepared to handle them efficiently. This will ensure a great customer experience.
Here are the 8 most common scenarios of customer interactions.
Let’s look at each scenario in detail to find out more about customer interactions.
A potential customer will look for information and may interact with your business either through the website, ads, social media, or any other channel. It’s a pre-sale stage and offers a great opportunity to understand what customers need.
When a customer looks for information, your focus has to be on delivering them value, educating them about your products, and removing all the bottlenecks from the way. The flow of information should be consistent to help customers decide the next course of action.
Customers can reach your business and for interactions when they are evaluating different solutions. They have discovered your brand, have analyzed competitor’s products as well, and now in the advanced stage of evaluating the choices at hand.
When customers are there for the purpose of evaluation, the flow of interactions and support should be on building trust and showing thought leadership in the industry.
In the evaluation stage, you need to use MOFU ( middle of the funnel) content to establish yourself as a trusted name in the industry.
64% of respondents say they give more value to user-generated feedback, peer reviews, and third-party data.
A lot of brands use reliable data and links to top industry sources or sponsor their own research as now buyers prefer third-party sources more for information. Buyers look for more real-life experiences and insight from third or neutral parties.
Customer onboarding interactions should be aimed at introducing your product to new users and help them learn how to use it. When the onboarding strategy is effective, users are able to easily understand the product which may improve their experience.
The purpose of onboarding interaction is also to generate interest in the product through a structured and step-by-step guide. The onboarding is always a dynamic process so you need to regularly revise, redesign, or upgrade it in alignment with the new features of the product.
40-60% of users who register for a free trial may never convert if proper onboarding processes and strategies are not used.
On the other hand, proper handling of the onboarding process can ensure a great experience to customers who will then spread the word and this can boost your results hugely.
Marketing, sales, and customer service are three of the main reasons why customers interact with businesses. Your business should take every interaction as a chance to delight, convert, and acquire customers.
Customer experience interactions can occur in different ways, be it when a customer sees your ads on social media and comments, or when signs up for a newsletter, or when attend one of your events.
Amazon is a great example of getting its strategy right with digital product experience. Their customer reviews are quite a powerful system to understand whether a product suits your needs.
Customers can face an urgent issue, which is mostly related to the purchased product. For pressing issues, it’s important to maintain an open and functional communication channel with support available across various channels.
You need to build a solid customer engagement strategy so that offering quick resolution is never an issue for your business. When there is no proper strategy in place, it can add definitely delay the response leading to dissatisfied customers.
33% of customers feel frustrated when having to wait on hold or when having to repeat themselves to multiple support reps.
To avoid such situations, your business needs to be prompt with the support and also with the resolution.
No business can wish away angry or upset customers. When customers are not happy with any aspect of the product, process, or service, the first thing they do is to reach out to the support team and vent the frustration.
Your sales, support, and marketing team needs to learn the skills to deal when being at the receiving end of the anger of client interactions. The focus should also be on maintaining the standards and etiquette of interactions and help customers with grace.
70% of unhappy customers will shop with your company again if their problems are solved by the support team.
A study by the Carey School of Business at Arizona State University revealed how the satisfaction level of customers doubled when a business added an apology with a monetary value.
When it comes to understanding your product inside-out, not all customers will show the same level of comfort. Some will find it easy to handle the while some will have confusion. And when customers are confused, they often have lots of questions and doubts which need to be answered to improve their comfort level with the product.
66% of consumers prefer watching a video to reading a document about a product.
So, using a how-to-video on your home page or website can definitely prove more value to confused users.
Interactions with a loyal customer are always easy but also involve a great deal of care. You know that a particular customer is already satisfied with the product or service, so you drop the guard a bit and this can work in reverse.
If a loyal customer reaches out to you, this brings a great opportunity to boost the bond and build a stronger customer connection through the right approach and offers. You have to delight such customers so that they can turn into brand advocates.
Winning new customers costs 5X more than retaining existing ones.
Frank Body, an Australian skincare company, encourages its customers to share photos using the company product for a chance to feature on the official Instagram account.
Customer experience is driven by how you manage customer interactions. Every interaction or your touchpoint presents an opportunity to engage or build a relationship with your customers. Similarly, managing customer interactions effectively should always be an essential part of your customer communication strategy.
By handling customer interactions successfully, your business can boost the conversion rate, reduce churn rate and enhance customer lifetime value (CL). And when your support team is rightly trained, achieving such targets is never that difficult.
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Praveen Singh is a content marketer, blogger, and professional with 15 years of passion for ideas, stats, and insights into customers. An MBA Graduate in marketing and a researcher by disposition, he has a knack for everything related to customer engagement and customer happiness.
As a writer and analyst, he pours the heart out on a blog that is informative, detailed, and often digs deep into the heart of customer psychology. He’s written extensively on a range of topics including, marketing, AI chatbots, omnichannel messaging platforms, and many more.
Mr. Singh also has a passion for subjects that excite new-age customers, be it social media engagement, artificial intelligence, machine learning. He takes great pride in his learning-filled journey of adding value to the industry through consistent research, analysis, and sharing of customer-driven ideas.
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