Strategies for Communicating Effectively with Customers

More than 85% of customers want ongoing communications from companies that they do business with. However, most customers quickly skim or completely ignore much of the communications that they receive because they are simply inundated everyday.  However, there are several strategies to ensure that your customers appreciate the communications that you send them and that you build strong and lasting relationships with them. 

When and why to communicate with customers

There are many reasons to communicate with your customers, but they can broadly be put in 5 main categories:

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Appointment reminders. Send a message before an appointment to convey meeting specifics and to make sure you are on the same page about the meeting. Details may include: date and time of the appointment, forms to be filled out in advance, etc.

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Meeting/service follow-ups. You may need to follow up with your clients.  These may be highly tailored, such as following up on a specific topic that was recently discussed. Or these may be general follow ups, such as asking for a Google Review after every appointment.

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Answering their questions. Clients frequently have questions before or after they have purchased your service or product.  Usually these questions are very specific. Sometimes these require long follow up conversations and sometimes a quick text is more than sufficient.

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Informing them of business changes. Communicating about any changes to the business, including changes in hours, locations, or new services and products being offered. These are usually mass messaging. And depending on the urgency, you may choose to communicate via email or text message.

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Encouraging them to buy our products or services. Usually mass marketing messages, these messages are great for building lasting relationships with clients.

Types of Communication

Long-form: Long form communication is usually used for detailed follow-ups and announcements. Usually these are sent via email.

Short-form: These are great for appointment reminders or follow-ups to quick questions.  These are easy to do via text message, email, or pre-recorded voice calls.

Group Messages: These can be either “long-form” or “short-form”, but they are usually impersonal, such as office moves or upcoming sales.  

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Considerations while Communicating with Customers

Content: The message of the communication needs to be tailored to the person with whom you are communicating. This is especially important in terms of the length of communication and the tone of the communication.

Length: 

• Long form communication should be informative while structured. Headers, bolding, and underlining can help to break up the text and while focusing your clients’ attention.
• Quick Question and Answer should be short, easy to skim, and clear. 
• Reminder Messages should also be short and informative, but should strike a balance between informative and communicative. Company name, appointment date, and appointment time. However, you can also include additional information such as forms to bring and location.  See some templates here.
• Group Messages are very flexible in terms of length, depending on the type of information sharing and the method of communication that you use (e.g., email vs. text messages).

Tone:

‍Finding the right tone frequently depends on the type of message. The tone should align with the message and recipient.  Choosing between formal vs informal can depend on several factors.  For example, a Salon may want to have an informal and fun tone for their appointment reminders while a doctors office may want to keep their appointment reminders formal.  The age of the target audience may also affect the decision to use informal vs. formal tone as younger audiences are more accustomed to informal language including the usage of abbreviations and emojis.  

How to Decide Whether to Use Text, Voice, and Email for Client Communication

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Text Messages

• Pros: Texting is fast and great for short, skim-able messages. It is an informal method of communication that is best for existing clients or more formal relationships that require urgent communications. Texting is also a great way to start short communication that can be picked up at any time. These include appointment reminders, reminders to submit documents, or invoice and billing reminders.
• Cons: Texting automatically establishes informal communication and, without context or voice tone, can be misinterpreted. Text messages are also shorter and therefore cannot contain as much information.

Emails

• Pros: Emails offer great flexibility in both formal and informal communication. Emails are also excellent for mass communication. With "CC" and "BCC" features, you can establish communication with many different people with varying degrees of transparency.
• Cons: Many people have inboxes with hundreds or thousands of unread emails, and one more email can get lost in the shuffle. Or even lost in a "Spam" folder. Because emails work well for longer communication, it is easy to pack too much information into an email and overload the reader.

Phone Calls

• Pros: Phone calls are great for urgent and real-time communication. With vocal inflection, communication is vastly improved, enabling the listener to discern "how" something is said. Not everyone has a cell phone or a computer, so phone calls are excellent for reaching people in an older generation.
• Cons: Many younger people, millennials and Gen-Z notoriously hate talking on the phone and often screen their incoming calls and rarely listen to their voicemail. Phone calls cannot be answered in lots of circumstances, such as if someone is in a meeting or on a flight. Phone calls also typically take longer to complete than other forms of communication. Since company staff can only handle one call at a time, manually completing phone call reminders or answering questions via phone can be a huge drain on employees’ limited time.

How Reminderly Can Help

Pick any method of communication

Reminderly allows you to send text messages, emails, or pre-recorded voice calls to your customers.

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Real-time messaging

Reminderly allows you to easily send and receive text messages in real-time to your clients.  This is a quick and effective way for you to send messages to your clients and for your clients to respond back.  Your staff and clients will love your ability to text instead of call.

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Schedule messaging

With Reminderly you can easily write a message and schedule it to be sent later.  This is perfect for upcoming office closers, marketing messages, etc.

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Group messaging

You can create an unlimited number of groups in Reminderly. For each person in the group, you can specify if the message should be sent via text, voice call, or email.  This allows you to send the message in the way that each of your clients prefer.  Although you only type the message once, each of your clients cannot see who else is in the group and all responses will always be sent to you, not the group.

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Appointment Reminders

Automated reminder messages can be fully customized to your business needs. With Reminderly you can send text, voice, and email reminders to your clients.  We easily integrate with many scheduling solutions including Google Calendars, Outlook Calendars, and Excel files.

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Message templates

You can create and save templates. When you frequently need to send the same message repeatedly, you can create templates to save you the time of having to rewrite it everytime.

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Pre-recorded automated calls

If you want a professional voice actor to record your phone message, please contact our customer service team.

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Post appointment surveys

You can automatically send surveys to your clients after every appointment.  Regularly asking for feedback is an important way to make sure that your customers are satisfied and remain loyal.  You can also ask them for online reviews from Google, Yelp, or Facebook.