Customer communication should be enjoyable, clear, and effective for both your support team and customers. But when businesses struggle with timely responses or accurate resolutions, they risk losing customer trust or even driving them away. It doesn't have to be this way.
Elevating your customer communication strategy positions your brand to nurture long-lasting relationships with your audience, increase customer loyalty, and create brand advocates who spread the word about the positive impact of your product or service.
Learn the fundamental principles of improving customer communication and see how you can use asynchronous messaging to personalize every customer touchpoint for higher retention rates.
The role of communication in customer relations
Even if you regularly interact with your customers, don’t forget that every touchpoint contributes to or detracts from the greater customer experience.
Are you satisfying customer needs throughout their customer journey? Customer relationships don’t stop after a sale. Teams still need to provide top support, including loyalty programs and post-purchase engagement. If you want customers to continue to pay for your services or purchase your product again, you need to nurture them throughout the entire product experience, which includes:
Brand presence and marketing
Prospects in your sales funnel
Customer support
Ongoing outreach and product updates
Excellent customer communication can fuel positive word-of-mouth referrals, and in turn, build a positive brand reputation that grows over time. Your industry and market track record will reflect those relationships. For example, if someone has a bad experience and your team didn’t resolve it, they’re going to let their inner circle know for a long time after that.
Nurturing relationships, as well as incorporating customer feedback and input, can help you improve and refine your products and experience. You can improve your customer interactions with the following three principles for customer satisfaction.
Principle 1: Building trust through transparency
When customers reach out to a brand out of frustration or have questions about a feature or service, a successful customer experience depends on your listening and communication skills. Customers want to feel heard and have clarity on the issue. Explain to them how the problem can be resolved—or, if it can’t be resolved, show empathy for their situation.
The more often you can communicate with customers, the better. That means quickly answering a customer even if you don’t have the perfect answer. It’s OK to say, “Thanks for letting me know about this issue. I’m working on it now and will get back to you within 24 hours to ensure you get the right solution.”
While a customer might prefer a solution immediately, they would much rather have honesty than no answer for three days—or worse, a non-answer that doesn't seem to help them.
Communication tools and channels can give you numerous ways to interface with your customers and maintain transparency:
Customer support: Tracking customer interactions with customer support software adds a layer of accountability for your teams. You can minimize confusion around the progress of a specific support need, inquiry, or resolution that you can then convert into a customer testimonial if their experience was positive.
Omnichannel solutions: While omnichannel communication tools, or solutions leveraging multiple channels, don’t always communicate all the visuals or in-depth information you want to convey to your customers, they can still be helpful. Keep customers updated on the order or shipping status of your products via SMS texts and/or email. If you want them to try out a new feature in your digital product, pair a well-placed in-app notification with your feature rollout on social media.
Video messaging: Capturing real-time footage of your product or service, tone of voice, and body language can elevate customer support needs and sales opportunities. Use a top communication tool like Loom to record your screen to highlight the specific solution your customer is seeking or demo a feature that is crucial for a product sale. Your customers will appreciate personalized communication crafted just for them.
Focus on cultivating an array of outlets for your team to efficiently provide clear, consistent, and helpful two-way interactions, whether on social media, in a customer support ticket, or through comments and emojis on a Loom video. If you invest in conversations with your customers, they’ll feel appreciated and know their concerns, questions, and input matter.
Principle 2: Personalization in customer interactions
Let’s reverse the seller-customer role for a moment. Imagine being the buyer and walking into an electronics store for the first time. Someone comes to help you and tries to sell a product or even proposes solutions to a pain point irrelevant to you. As a customer, you lose interest quickly. You don’t feel like the employee cares about your needs or what you’re in the store for—they’re only pushing for a sale.
This scenario is a big reminder that:
People don’t want to connect with brands. They want to communicate with people.
Sellers should create the most personalized and relevant experience possible.
Personal communication and timing are critical to better customer support and relationships. How you communicate with a customer says a lot about how you value them, and it puts you ahead of the curve for potential customer frustrations.
Senior Marketing Manager at Loom, Jeong Lee, states on strategies for customer connections:
“The primary reason most companies don’t have an excellent customer connection is that they don’t invest in proactive communications. Instead, they only speak with customers when they are trying to close the deal, resolve a complaint or support ticket, or handle a cancellation request.”
Lee continues, explaining how even the brands that do try their best to connect, assume customers are brand zealots. But people don’t form relationships with brands. They want connections with people. The people-first mentality is a much more effective model to make customer support relational.
Companies can shift inactive, impersonal customer service communication strategies by constantly finding ways to communicate on a personal level.
For example, when a customer signs up for your product or service, you can send a Loom video thanking them and providing a unique use case specific to the pain points the customer communicated during onboarding. You can also send a customized video answering a customer’s specific question.
These personal connections add a more profound element to nurturing that helps solidify your brand and create loyal customers.
Principle 3: Consistency across all channels
Whether it’s through an email, social media direct message, or a ticket submission, you want to provide the same level of customer support through all communication channels and points of contact.
For example, if someone gets immediate support after they send an email, that’s a win. On the flip side, if that same customer sends you a direct message on X (formerly Twitter) or Instagram and gets no answer for three days—or an unhelpful chatbot message—that customer receives a subpar and disappointing experience.
That’s why it’s critical to ensure that you can provide high-quality customer communication in real-time across all open contact points.
Part of the solution is streamlining your approach to customer communication.
Written messages might not convey the context of complex, personalized answers you want to provide. However, quick video messaging tools can make it easy for your team members to record their screens and present a solution. If you use Loom, you can even use Variables to add customized names and other elements to your videos, scaling your customer communication effectively while keeping it personal.
Even in a technical or complex situation, video content can quite literally “show” a solution or capture a training process rather than “tell” in a lengthy wall of text. Your customer support team can collaborate with your engineers or technical professionals to record a straightforward solution for the customer. Loom lets you record quick videos in just a couple of minutes so you can send messaging across all channels—and even add demos and explainer videos to your online knowledge base that customers can return to at their convenience.
Lastly, customer service reps can integrate Loom with their customer relationship management (CRM) platform to incorporate video messaging for higher-quality responses and well-documented interactions. Zendesk users can even use inline play with Loom. No matter your CRM tool, you can send customer videos with a link or an email.
Implementing these principles in your strategy
Improving your customer communication strategy starts with implementing principles for a people-first approach to relationships. Once you’ve adopted these principles, find the right platform for personal customer communication.
And here lies one of the biggest challenges: Your customers want to speak to an actual human, but they’re likely distributed across multiple time zones with their own busy schedules. Even a blend of outbound communication channels, like email, social media engagement, and traditional methods like call centers and ticketing systems, can’t always meet those needs.
That’s where video messages for customer support come in. Video messaging helps you leverage customer support strategies without being on a live phone call or Zoom session.
Imagine a customer emailing you about how to use a new feature for a specific use case. You can easily level up customer support by sending a video reply as a follow-up outlining the use case step-by-step. The customer gets a hyper-relevant answer, and you win them over with a personal response.
These moments make a difference in long-term customer relationships and customer base growth. Unfortunately, not all tools can put the “personal” connection in digital workspaces. It can feel cold and often disconnected compared to a warmer, face-to-face connection.
The good news is that you can adopt a video messaging solution like Loom that provides personal and fun experiences through its many customer engagement features.
Choosing the right customer communication tool
Loom offers the human-to-human touch that’s often lost in digital communications. You can record a POV customer message by recording your screen and webcam simultaneously to share an answer, present an instructional video, or walk through a product demo. Viewers can comment with emojis, send video replies, and interact with you 24/7.
Since Loom videos have a casual feel, viewers feel they communicate with an authentic, supportive person. You, the recorder, press the capture button in your Chrome extension, Loom app, computer, or mobile device and share your input—no need to worry about occasional pauses, filler words, or mistakes. It’s a human, personal conversation with professional delivery.
Plus, with Loom’s AI add-on, you can remove unnecessary words, use Live Rewind to re-record a section without starting the whole video over, and automatically generate titles and summaries for videos to save time.
Loom allows your customer service teams to interface with customers anywhere in the world, regardless of busy schedules or time zones. In only a few minutes, you can create videos with more context than a traditional written message or chatbox reply and exceed customer expectations.
Record your first customer support message today for free.