Communication between businesses and their customers has never been more valued than in 2020. With COVID-19 continuing to force us to ride its waves yet again, online communication has become much more relied on and in most cases, it’s all we’ve got.
With the holidays coming up fast, now is when your business absolutely needs to be in touch with customers online. The phone can only do so much, especially if everyone needs your services all at once. Extending your service to online will at least help reduce the sense of overwhelm and anxiety your employees may be feeling right now.
Let’s go over together how we can best improve your business’s website for the sake of communication. Here are three suggestions worth considering.
Add Live Chat
If you already don’t have live chat, this can improve the way you get in touch with your customers in real time. Live chat is best suited for companies who want to show their clientele that they are highly accessible and available for anything. There’s no better way to tell your customers that you are there when they need you than with this communication channel.
To find the best plugin for using live chat, look at your CRM platform. The best kind will integrate smoothly with yours and provide the much-needed view of your customers so that you can provide them with more personalized service as opposed to the one-size-fits-all kind that chatbots are better known for (check out our blog post to find out more).
Create an Omnichannel Strategy
With everyone using the Internet and online services more than ever now, your website should not be the only channel where your business can be contacted. It’s the launchpad for online communication, certainly, but it shouldn’t be your only strategy. With everyone doing their shopping online and using social media to communicate, you can’t afford to leave any of these channels untouched and unmonitored.
Now is the time to stay active on social media, update the profiles and information within them, keep your blog going, and stay vigilant about your listings such as in Google. Even one slight update to each type of profile can be enough to help customers become aware of your online presence and make them more likely to contact you online. If your business is available online but not at a physical office, this is also something you should update your profiles with. If hours of operation have changed or will change for the holidays, change that now as opposed to waiting until the very last minute.
Naturally it’s best to have an ongoing strategy for your blog in the first place, and you need to make sure each post is quality content. Incorporating more videos into your strategy can also be beneficial if you’re able to.
Keep Contact Forms Simple
Every time a customer must reach out to a business, there is always an internal struggle for them to release their private information online. After all, it’s easy to enter an e-mail address, but another story entirely if that information is compromised i.e. sold to third-person parties or hacked, etc. That’s why your job when it comes to communication is to keep your contact forms simple as possible so that the user providing you with their info can decide to go ahead and reach out to you.
- Ask for as little information as possible when it comes to contact forms. An e-mail address and first and last name should suffice.
- If you want to ask for their phone number and address, or you want them to leave you a detailed message, make these optional.
- Make the action button clear and visible once the form’s been filled out.
Creating forms on your website doesn’t have to be rocket science (if for any reason it is, you can always ask our V3 professionals to create one for you). Sometimes cutting down your requests for their information and limiting it to an e-mail address may be all you need to do to improve the way your site communicates with them.
Need Help?
If you have no idea how to implement any of these solutions, or perhaps your biggest issue is with the site’s structure and content as a whole, it may be worthwhile to get a new website instead (and if you’re still hemming and hawing about that, click here to see some reasons why it’s actually a great idea). If you want to start improving communications now while there’s still time, give us a call today. By making the improvements now, you’ll be set for next year as well.