Customer Communication: 6 Key Strategies For Ecommerce (2024)

A successful business doesn’t just need a stellar product—customers also want to feel like their voices and concerns are important. In fact, 85% of consumers report that their favorite brand “treats them like an individual.”

Katherine Oyer, owner of modern baby apparel store Francis Henri, is focused on building this kind of relationship.

“If you have a wonderful customer experience and a superior product, people come back,” Katherine says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “I have always felt word of mouth and loving on your customer, turning them into clients, making them friends—I find those are the advertising dollars I’d rather spend.”

Customer communication management is critical to building relationships with buyers. It can improve the customer experience, encourage referrals, and help you garner repeat business.Here’s how businesses communicate with customers, and six communication tips to help you improve your brand reputation and increase customer loyalty.

Types of customer communication

Effective communication strategies involve multiple communication channels and methods. Here’s an overview of common types:

Phone

Many businesses allow customers to contact them by phone, either employing a 24/7 answering service or restricting calls to specific business hours. Phone calls can be an efficient and convenient way to resolve issues and build customer relationships, but you can take only so many calls at once—and customers can become frustrated by long hold times.

You can minimize response time by using call menus to route customers to the correct department, offering call-back services, and including information about self-service options in your recorded greeting.

Live chat

Like phone calls, live chats can offer immediate and personalized support. They also allow agents to field multiple customer requests at once, which can make them a cost-effective alternative to phone support. Some companies also augment live chat services with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, which can answer questions like “Where’s my order” or “How do I start a return” and automatically route more complex requests to the appropriate team member.

Email

Email is an asynchronous communication channel, which can make it a convenient option for you and your customers. Clients can send questions whenever they have them (including at 2 a.m. or over a holiday weekend), and you can reply on the next business day or during whatever time block you set aside for responding to customer emails.

It can be less effective for urgent requests, but you can keep customers in the loop by sending an automated initial response that confirms the receipt of an inquiry and lets them know when they can expect to hear back from your team. You can also include directions to more immediate support options, if applicable.

In-person

You can also communicate with customers face to face or blend in-person and digital interactions. Francis Henri offers a buy online, pickup in-store option that allows customers to come in and talk to store personnel, ask questions, and browse. They also offer curbside pickup.

“If there is a mom who has a sleeping baby, we’ll get messages that say, can you just run my bag out?” says Katherine.

Social media

There are multiple ways to communicate with customers on social media channels. You can accept direct messages on Instagram, X, and Facebook Messenger, reply to social media posts that tag your brand, and interact with customers in the comments section of your business’s posts.

Use social media monitoring tools (also known as social listening tools) to track conversations about your company and take a proactive approach to customer appreciation and support.

How to ensure great customer communication

Great communication can increase customer trust in your brand, helping you attract and retain customers and encouraging existing customers to spread the word about your company. Here are six strategies to improve your customer communication efforts:

Use a varied communication strategy

Do you have any friends who hate talking on the phone? Or a relative who can’t seem to figure out social platforms? Odds are that versions of these people exist in your customer base, too—their communication preferences might be peculiar, but they’re also strong.

Diverse communication strategies allow customers to choose a communication method based on their unique channel preferences—whether that’s email, direct message, live chat, or phone. It involves offering multiple outreach options and providing a unified cross-channel experience.

Unified inboxes and customer relationship management (CRM) systems can consolidate outreach from customers coming from various channels. It stores customer data in a centralized location, allowing your support team to provide a consistent customer experience and efficiently manage multiple channels.

Maintain a consistent brand voice

Your brand voice is a critical part of your company’s identity. It informs your written content, how you show up in online spaces, and how customers understand the value you provide. It’s also not just the marketing department’s responsibility. You can improve customer communication and strengthen your brand image by helping team members adopt your brand voice for sales and support interactions. Use your brand voice in internal communications, and encourage reps to remain consistent across channels.

You can also include service-focused brand voice examples in your brand guidelines. For example, if your voice is upbeat, positive, and playful, you might encourage the use of exclamation points and emojis, and warn against formal language or technical jargon.

Engage your employees

Customer service training can help your employees boost customer satisfaction by offering consistent, high-quality support. Here’s what to include:

• Policies and procedures. Assess your team’s knowledge base, invite questions, and provide them with current copies of your customer service policy guidelines. You can also remind team members where to look when questions come up.

• Skills-building. Live demos, self-reflection activities, and real-life call recordings illustrate situations that can help your reps build empathy, improve communication skills, and form better relationships with customers.

• Tricky situations. Customer service training also prepares your team members to handle customer complaints in a respectful and timely manner. Consider role-playing challenging calls or inviting your team to workshop solutions to a proposed scenario.

🌟 From active listening to improvisation to resilience, here’s what you need to know to develop customer service skills for you and your team.

Personalize customer interactions

Research shows customers expect personalized interactions and reward businesses offering them. To improve personalization, store customer data in a centralized location (like a CRM) and use it to personalize relevant communications, including emails, outreach calls, and marketing messages.

You can also store service call information in customer profiles—allowing your team members to pass service tickets between reps or departments without losing information—or use an AI-enabled virtual assistant to automatically summarize calls.

Solicit customer feedback

Customer feedback can provide insight into customer expectations and experiences, helping you better understand your target audience and identify areas for improvement.

Popular options include surveys, reviews, customer focus groups, and one-on-one interviews with existing customers. You can also use customer service tools to automate requests and identify trends in large volumes of data. Focus on the entire customer journey—not just service communications—and remember that feedback requests are customer interactions. It takes time and energy to provide feedback, so show appreciation with personalized responses or rewards.

Provide a personal touch

Don’t underestimate the value of getting personal. You’re a real person, and your customers are too—so build connections by focusing on the shared human element.

“We send a handwritten thank you card in every package,” says Katherine, adding that she doesn’t cut corners on these details. “The customer experience is so important for me. I wanted the experience of receiving a box to be almost like a gift.”

You can also show your appreciation with personal thank you calls, emails, or invite-only customer events. Communicating effectively is about bringing your authentic self to the table, so don’t overthink it. Ask yourself why a customer’s loyalty matters to you, and say (or type) that.