How to build customer trust through consistency?
In my previous post, I discussed why customer support, service and experience leaders must invest in effective communication. Effective communication means having the right interaction at the right moment that delivers a positive experience and outcome. This drives the pace of progress and the achievement of business goals.
One critical—and underestimated—component of effective communication is consistency. Delivering consistent experiences—in terms of similar messaging, values and language across all touchpoints—directly affects both customer satisfaction and business outcomes. In fact, consistent brand presentation can impact revenue by as much as 33 percent. Nearly three-fourths (73 percent) of consumers would even go so far as to take their business elsewhere if they don’t receive a consistent experience across channels.
Consistency can no longer be an afterthought for customer-facing teams. This is a problem that has persisted for some time in business. Over five years ago, I wrote an article about the impact of inconsistencies on customer experience investments. Fast-forward to today, and emerging challenges are exacerbating the issue of inconsistency, driving up costs, eroding the customer experience and preventing support and service leaders from delivering efficient growth.
What is CSAT?
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), is a key performance indicator term that is frequently used in marketing to track and measure how satisfied customers are with an organization’s products or services.
Why is there a need for consistently effective communication?
Today’s customer support and service leaders have a daunting task in front of them: increase both the speed and quality of support, all while lowering costs. What many brands fail to realize is that consistent communication directly enables these goals—or hinders them, if not addressed.
For one, consistency is at the core of the ability to meet new customer demands and support needs. Most consumers (75 percent) now expect consistent experiences across multiple channels. But an influx of support tickets and new channels, chat and messaging tools have created more opportunities for disconnected, disjointed interactions. When teams communicate with customers in conflicting ways, it creates frustration and more back-and-forth that decreases both the quality and efficiency of support.
This comes amid the rise in remote communication and more distributed teams, which make it more challenging to present a united front. From recent conversations with industry peers and our own customers, I have heard first-hand about the challenge of delivering more cohesive interactions in this dispersed, diverse environment. Leaders tell us they need to keep teams aligned to build customer trust and credibility, but approaches like manual guidelines, hotkeys and knowledge management systems fall short in delivering consistency.
In these scenarios, leaders should not have to make trade-offs between quality and efficiency to keep up with new demands. By doubling down on consistent communication internally and externally, they can drive up customer satisfaction while realizing new business outcomes.
How does scaling consistent communication boost CSAT and efficiency?
Most leaders might recognize that consistent communication is valuable, but many have not fully realized the impact on their business or pursue solutions that fail to deliver returns. Traditional approaches to improve consistency—such as manual tools and increasing employee training—are costly, time-intensive to manage and ultimately cannot scale to the level necessary to meet new operating models.
However, new AI tools and technologies are available that provide automated ways to keep teams in sync and on-brand. For example, platform-agnostic tools like AI-powered writing assistants and living style guides offer real-time guidance to employees around the correct language, brand names, terminology, style and even tone. By integrating into all the places customers and employees already interact in, these tools can remove communication bottlenecks and deliver double-digit improvements in both customer satisfaction and efficiency.
For instance, one popular web hosting platform increased its CSAT by 30 percent and improved overall productivity through consistent customer communication. The company’s support team had been struggling with confusing, disjointed interactions that slowed down service and frustrated customers and it needed to build a more positive, productive experience for customers and employees alike.
By implementing AI-powered writing assistant technology to enhance the consistency and efficiency of communications, the company achieved its highest levels of customer satisfaction on record. The technology operates seamlessly across existing systems and workflows, leading to immediate results: the team saw customer feedback scores improve within a month.
Moreover, the offering enhanced the entire support team’s communication skills at scale without investing in dedicated training, increasing efficiency, saving costs and allowing for continuous improvement over time. Employees also praised the solution for its ability to serve as a helpful writing “coach,” improving confidence across the team and alleviating the burden on high-performers.
How can leaders assess the impact of more consistent communication?
Improving communication consistency should be a high-stakes priority for any customer-facing leader who is serious about reaching their goals. Here are a few key questions to consider in assessing the value for your organization:
[inlinead-1]
- In what ways and what places are we interacting with customers (e.g., email, messaging and chat tools, knowledge base, etc.), and how consistent are we in those communications?
- What investments have we made to ensure consistency with customers and employees? (e.g., training, manual guidelines, QA processes, etc.)
- Are these delivering continuous improvements toward business goals, or where are they lacking? (e.g., frequent inconsistencies across interactions, managers spending time reducing errors, training has not increased CSAT, etc.)
- How is inconsistency costing my organization? (e.g., declining CSAT, high support and training costs, reduced growth, rapid attrition, etc.)
If leaders find their investments have fallen short, it’s time to re-focus on solutions specifically designed to deliver clear, consistent communication across all channels, systems, and touchpoints. By building consistent communication across the entire customer journey, organizations can create more impactful customer experiences and reach new levels of performance.
For more on how consistent communication leads to greater customer satisfaction and efficiency, visit www.grammarly.com/business.