How you interact with your customers is a big topic. It is something you’ll want to consider as you go forward in your business because it can have a massive impact on whether you make consistent sales. Learning how to communicate with clients, employees, and partners is essential if you want to grow your company and thrive. 

So, what’s our advice for interacting with your clients and customers?

How to Communicate with Clients

Be Friendly And Approachable

When talking to prospective clients make sure that you are meeting them where they are. It’s likely that they are not well-versed in your industry vocabulary. That being said, ensure they understand your messages clearly. 

You also want to be as friendly and approachable as possible. Treat customers as if you want them to come back (because you do!).

I always want to be perceived as friendly and approachable in my business. I want my clients to know they have me in their corner when it comes to their project. That means that they can ask any questions or clarifications.

Look out for what they say and show them empathy. Pay attention to their concerns and aim to address them if you can promptly. Don’t leave them wondering what’s going to happen next. 

Personalize The Interaction

Whenever possible, personalize the interaction. When you use their name, it feels more personal, and like the client is more than just a client. Remember details what they’ve said to you before. Recounting these details builds rapport and encourages them to trust you with their business.

Getting to know someone makes interactions easier and more natural, allowing you to go off-script and get to know your customers in more detail. And I always recommend if you’re a solopreneur or one-person operation, that connecting with clients builds that solid foundations, rather than treating it as just a transaction.

Communicate With Clients Regularly

I’m all for work/life boundaries, but it’s important that you return communication to your clients and customers quickly and efficiently. That doesn’t mean reply to an email at 2am. But it can mean drafting a response at 10pm before you go to bed and scheduling it to send in the morning. We want clients to know that we’re real people with lives too!

Obviously, if you run a business by yourself, keeping the conversation going all night isn’t an option. But one of the benefits of conversational AI platform solutions is that they can run 24/7 and you don’t need to do anything. The software is now meaningfully good enough to have full conversations with your audience and solve their problems for them. Then, if there’s something you need to look at, it can wait until morning. 

Respond Quickly When You Communicate with Clients

When you receive a message from a customer, ensure you answer it promptly. Responding to inquiries and questions within a few hours (or minutes depending on your business) shows that you take your customers’ concerns seriously. 

The best way to speed up your responses is to save canned answers you can cut and paste whenever a customer asks a specific question or makes an inquiry. These can be helpful and you can personalize them relatively easily. However, you can also field more staff or get them to use chat apps that let them communicate with multiple customers at the same time. 

Ask Customers For Feedback

Finally, it’s good practice to ask customers for feedback after interacting with them. This courtesy shows them you care about their needs and want to make improvements. As business owners, we should always be improving our processes so that we can give our clients and customers the best experience — so that they can refer their friends!