Customer Interactions: How to Build Relationships Through Responsiveness

Cultivating the relationships you have with your customers is key to building your brand and growing your business. With social media, brands have access to all the tools they need to connect with customers around the world in an authentic and personalized way. Because of this, social platforms have become the default support channel for the majority of internet users, with as many as 87% of customers saying that it’s their preferred communication method. To maximize their success, brands need to invest in improved responsiveness on social media.

Build a Strong Community Through Social Media

Social media is a two-way street, and customers expect you to engage with their feedback. When you consistently respond to your audience and their content, you are laying the foundations needed to build a strong community around your brand. Ultimately, your goal as a brand should be for customers to buy into more than just a specific product or service that you offer. Ideally, customers should be buying into your brand as a whole and see you as a reliable source for future purchases. Having a strong community built around your brand is the perfect way to start.

Your customers are bound to talk about your brand online. Jumping into those conversations is a great way to show them that you’re listening and care about their feedback. Whether it’s replying to a Tweet or reposting an Instagram Story, these interactions are crucial to showcasing your brand’s authenticity and demonstrating to your customers that you value their support. New features, like Instagram’s ‘Add Yours’ sticker, are making it even easier for you to grow your brand’s community. You can take advantage of features such as this one by encouraging customers to post using your brand’s hashtags or stickers. Having these posts visible in one place is beneficial to creating a community where your customers feel included.

Respond to Your Customers’ Feedback

Even with a strong community around your brand, competition is always one click away. Responsive support, be it pre-sales, after-sales, or not even sales-related, is the name of the game when it comes to offering a quality of customer experience. We live in an era where users have short attention spans and instant gratification is the norm. Offering your customers a prompt response to their questions or concerns is the best way to keep them engaged with your brand. To make sure you are at the top of your game, you should always enable notifications, or look to dedicated tools that can help manage interactions with customers. This way, you never miss a beat.

When it comes to offering the best support, it’s extremely important that you never discourage customers from sharing feedback. These perspectives, even when negative, are valuable to growing your brand and expanding your customer base. Being aware of what customers want to see next is critical to improving the products and services you offer. It’s extremely helpful to implement a structured process where your team can organize feedback and inquiries that you can reference when brainstorming new products or features. This is as easy as using a spreadsheet, but you can invest in tools like a roadmap management platform.

Once you’ve taken feedback into consideration, a great personal touch is to let customers who submitted their suggestions know that their requested improvement is now available. This shows customers that you actually took the time to listen to their feedback and went as far as implementing changes. These steps are likely to increase customer satisfaction and improve retention.

Grow Your Social Sales

Improving online responsiveness becomes even more important with the growth of social commerce. Now that customers can buy directly on social platforms, not interacting with customers on social media is the equivalent of not paying attention to customers in your store in a retail context. There were an abundance of new social commerce features introduced across a wide variety of platforms this year, including expansions to shoppable links and posts within Instagram and Pinterest. Increasing social media engagement with customers is crucial to thrive in this new era of e-commerce.

In addition to shoppable posts, live shopping offers a unique new way to improve interactions with customers through a method that can directly increase your sales. New features within established platforms, like Pinterest TV and Facebook Live Shopping, are making it easy for brands to add a personal touch to their customer interactions.

This method of online commerce allows brands to connect with customers who can provide instant feedback, and businesses have the opportunity to answer questions on the spot. Combining the quick responsiveness of live video with shoppable links and posts is a great way to increase conversions and foster the community around your brand.

In Summary

Personalized interaction on social media is key to growing your brand. Being responsive and attentive to your audience can be achieved in a number of ways. By setting notifications on native social media apps and sites or by using a dedicated tool, such as Loomly Interactions, you can make sure that you are always on top of customer support and in touch with the community around your brand. If you do this, you can more easily ensure that you are consistently offering your customers a quality shopping experience.