In any business keeping up with your competitors is an important thing.
Standing out in a crowd of companies that offer products and services similar to yours, is yet another challenge. And it’s essential for success.
One way to stay above water in a vast sea of competition is to provide excellent customer experience for all your clients. You can do it by adding some special sauce to the way you interact with your customers.
That special ingredient is humanity.
Humanity
People crave it. And especially so in the world of impersonal communication, constant interactions with technology, and just general disconnect between people.
Bringing humanity into the customer experience will make your company more memorable, will help you build strong relationships with your clients, and will result in repeat business, referrals, and higher revenues.
There are mountains of advice on how to make your customer service more personable. We found five best customer experience articles that offer some flavorful tips.
Each of these articles offers unique techniques that can make you stand out and shine among competition.
The tips these customer experience experts discuss truly bring humanity into the picture because the senses they activate are uniquely and universally human – laughing, listening, seeing, innovating, and making mistakes.
Five Human Skills to Boost Customer Experience Satisfaction
1. Using Humor
Laughter is the best medicine. It’s a good connector, too.
No matter how serious we are in business and in life, we can all appreciate a bit of humor.
When it comes to customer service, keeping things light can definitely make the experience personable, less formal, and more enjoyable for both the employee and the customer.
In “No Laughing Matter: Is There Room for Humor in Customer Service?” Rafaela Cortez discusses how adding a bit of humor to customer service interactions goes a long way.
There’s room for a sense of humor, sure. But above all, there’s a burning desire to be a bit more personal. To bring humanity back to Customer Service. In the end, humor is just one of the ways to accomplish that. Whether it’s through April Fool’s pranks, nerf gun battles or just a friendly email — it hardly matters. Rather, it’s a laughing matter.
2. Using Storytelling
Ever wonder why we cannot stop watching some commercials? It’s because they tell stories.
We all love a good story. No matter where we are, as soon as we hear someone telling one our ears perk up and we tune in. It’s human nature. Stories bring us closer together because we all share this curiosity.
That is why experts in all fields have been bringing up the millennium-old tradition of storytelling into the business world. If you have a good story, people will listen.
In “Using Journey Maps to Tell a Customer’s Story” Annette Franz explores how storytelling can not only help companies get a better idea about their customers, but how it can humanize the whole experience. Customer experience is a journey and journeys come with both maps and stories.
Stories are a wonderful communication tool and a powerful teaching tool. They allow you to deliver a message in a way that engages the audience, helps them understand the characters in play, and, hopefully, inspires them. People tend to connect to stories and, therefore, remember them and the message they convey.
Related Post: Six Steps to Successful Customer Journey Mapping
3. Using Visual Communications
Showing is always more powerful than telling.
Yeah, yeah, we all put in the effort into verbal communication, but if there is an illustration we are all over that. Humans are visual animals. We like pictures.
In “4 Easy Ways Visual Engagement Improves Customer Communication” Holly Chessman gives great tips on how to power charge customer experience by showing rather than simply telling. With demos, presentations, infographics, charts, and other visual aids customer interactions become clearer, more efficient, and more satisfying.
Visual engagement is a critical set of tools, especially for online businesses that sell complex offerings…Visual engagement brings instant understanding to otherwise challenging situations, expanding the power of your agents to communicate.
4. Using technology to make more personal connections
Does your toddler handle your phone better than you do? Is your grandpa rocking candy crush on his tablet?
Chances are, everyone you know engages with technology on some level. We learn it quickly and we adapt to how it makes our lives easier and funner. Human love innovation and the gadgets that come with it.
Today artificial intelligence is bringing advances into customer experience like never before. From features such as self-service to extremely efficient data analysis, technological advances have the ability to transform customer experiences into truly personal endeavors.
It’s ironic, really, that with more AI in our lives we come together closer as humans.
In “Building Beautiful Customer Experiences With AI” Blake Morgan discusses AI tools such as chatbots, personalization and customer insights.
She explains how these tools can help brands recognize, remember and provide relevant offers. Morgan touches on current ways companies can implement AI in their daily operations. She talks about the challenges of human-AI relationships. The author also takes a look into the future of technology and its use in customer experiences.
We shouldn’t be afraid of technology—we should embrace it and learn to use it in the right places. AI machines can listen, understand the context, personalize every interaction and work faster than humans. The best brands leverage this technology to make their customers’ lives better.
Realter Post: 5 Ways AI is Personalizing the Customer Experience
5. Making Mistakes and Owning Them
There is nothing more human than making mistakes.
We all make them and we’re all feel badly when we do. Owning our mistakes is hard, but necessary. It makes us more vulnerable, but that is what exposes us as real, imperfect humans we all are.
That vulnerability, in turn, brings us closer to other humans. Our customers included.
In the world of online reviews, our mistakes become public.
In “Why you don’t want a 5-star rating on Yelp and Google (and more shocking facts)” folks at Womply examine the statistics of all businesses with reviews. Turns out most online reviews are positive, but negative reviews don’t impact businesses the way one might think they do.
In any case, it’s good to show your imperfections, because, hey, who wants to be perfect, anyway?
So it seems clear that, rather than being concerned about bad reviews or a less-than-stellar star rating, small business owners should focus their efforts on engaging their current and potential customers online and working toward a regular supply of fresh reviews.
Take Aways
Bringing humanity into customer experiences is no easy task. Companies need all the help they can get to engage their clients and make the experience more personable.
So get your reading hat on and check out these customer experience expert opinions.
Which ones will work for you?
