Communication skills with customers

Communication skills with customers

In this article, you can learn the important and outstanding communication skills with customers. Communicating with customers in an effective way is incredibly important.

Communication is essential for human interaction. It becomes more important when it comes to business settings.

For businesses, how to communicate with customers is an important aspect of business environment.

Undoubtedly, effective communication skills are much needed to grow your business. These are highly recommended for customers’ satisfaction.

Communication skills are important equally for business-to-business (B2B) as well as business-to-customer (B2C). Whatever the business set up the skills are important and they play an effective role.

How to communicate with customers online and how to communicate with customers on phone, all these equally need strong communication skills.

Communication is not only important in face-to-face, online and telephonic dealings, but also it plays a vital in automated system.

Why Communication Skills are Important with Customers?

There are a lot of benefits of good communication with customers. Customers are foundation of any business. They are like a blood line. Cash flow takes place from customers to business.

Customers have the power to make or break any business. If you interact with your customers in an effective way, it can lead to increased sales and business growth.

For a business an important thing is to attract and retain customers. That is the most difficult task for any business. But, effective communication makes it easy.

Nurturing strong communication skills with customers can make it possible to attract new customers, build up a strong association with existing customers, and resolve customers’ concerns.

Poor communication with customers creates negative impact on your business. 

The organisations constantly experience poor customer service ultimately go out of business.

The businesses should provide good customer service in order to stay profitable. Communication skills help a business to achieve goals.

Customers’ satisfaction is the ultimate goal of a business. Satisfied customers will become the promoter of your business.

They will promote and recommend your products or services to other people through words of mouth.

You must develop strong communication skills to communicate with customers clearly and effectively.

Communication Skills for Customer Service

What are the skills that make communication with customers effective?

There are some fundamental and essential skills that should be learnt to improve your business.

You must master those skills to provide exceptional customer services, because happy and satisfied customers’ experience is significant for your business.

Positive customer service can lead to increased sales, and positive words of mouth.

On the other hand, poor customer service can lead to decreased sales and negative words of mouth. And that affects the reputation of any business in a negative way.

In this section, I illustrated the basic and important communication skills that will help you to interact with your customers in a better way.

Listening skills

How it is possible to ignore the core element of communication skills and that is listening skills.

Listening, it is the ability to receive, interpret, and understand the message in an accurate way during communication process.

Listening is an important part of communication. Effective communication based upon listening.

You have a business or you work in any customer settings, this is the skill you have to master.

It forms the foundation for effective customer service communication. It helps to turn negative experience into positive.

It improves customers’ satisfaction and experience, when they think there is an active listening from other side.

Active listening

Only listening is not enough for effective communication. Rather you will have to go one step ahead and that is active listening.

It doesn’t mean just listen your customers, but listen to understand them. It plays an important role when the conversation is taking place on phone or online, because you don’t see the body language.

Without active listening the messages can be misunderstood and misinterpreted, and that can cause bad customers’ experience.

Active listening means completely engaging yourself with customer, understanding language and voice, and the use of body language.

It also refers to show interest, concern, and focus on customers’ problems and to resolve them.

The major benefits of active listening are, to keep focus on customers’ experience, reduces the chances of miscommunication, and increases customers’ satisfaction.

Active listening skills are so important that many organisations train their employees for it and therefore it makes an essential part of customer communication strategy.

Persuasive Skills

You can’t undermine the power of persuasion skills. People with persuasion skills can easily influence others.

When it comes to customer service it becomes even more important.

Many people use persuasion and manipulation interchangeably. But, there is difference between these two.

Manipulation means when you influence and convince someone in a negative way, but persuasion means to influence and convince someone in a positive way.

Maybe someone born with these skills what we call God gifted. But, in reality it can be learnt and develop with a conscious effort.

These skills are important generally in all methods of communicating with customers, and in particularly face-to-face customer service.

If you want to take your customer service to the next level, you must master persuasion skills to convince customers effectively.

Truly, it can help you to attract and retain your customer.

Ability to Handle Difficult Situations

Difficult situations and pressures are very common in customer service. Dealing with difficult and unwanted situations is a skill and many of us don’t know how to cope with.

It becomes more difficult when there are no guidelines for a particular situation to handle.

This skill can help you in many situations such as deescalation of anger, or convincing a frustrated customer.

You must develop these kinds of skills to face and manage surprising situations effectively.

Connecting to Customers

How to connect to your customer is a skill. It means finding the common grounds between you and your customer.

When you succeed to find similarities between you and your customer it naturally connects you both.

For example, if coincidentally you and your customer graduated from the same university, most probably the discussion will go further deeper and it will be a connecting and convincing point for you.

Body Language (Non-verbal Communication)

Imagine the power of body language, I mean non-verbal communication. Non-verbal communication is 55% of all communication.

Your gestures and postures matter especially in face-to-face communication.

How to use your body language to influence and convince others is a skill.

For example, making eye contact with your customers is an effective way to communicate. By eye contact you can engage your customer in conversation.

Your facial impressions and smiles even make a difference. They are even more important than your words.

On one hand you should know how to use body language and, on the other hand you must read and understand the body language of your customer.

Your Tone of Voice and Words

Your tone of voice and words also matter a lot when in a customer settings.

Customers appreciate a friendly tone. It can improve the relationship with your customer more personal.

With an effective tone you can convince an angered and unconvinced customer.

Tailoring tone to a particular situation is the right use of this skill.

How to use positive language and words is a great skill. Selection of words can help to personalise communication with customers.

Positive words improve good customer experience. Words you use in customer dealing have huge impact on customer service.

Skills to Read Customer

You must master the skill to read your customer. This is an important and essential skill to master.

If you have ability to read your customer it will be so easy to convince your customers.

It helps to understand the emotional state of the customer, and then it becomes easy to communicate effectively.

If you misread a customer it can lead to miscommunication and confusion.

To have effective communication you should read customers’ mood, personality, and level of patience to keep the interaction with your customer positive.

Final Thoughts

You have a business or you work in a customer service environment these skills will definitely help you.

Mastering and improving these skills will also help you to communicate and convince effectively.

If you want to avoid miscommunication and negative customer experience then these skills for you.

I believe, these communication skills with customers will improve customers’ satisfaction, and also beneficial for organisations.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are communication skills in customer service?

Communication skills refer the way you communicate or interact with customers. For effective interaction you need communication skills such as understanding customers’ psychology, listening, persuasion etc.

Why is communication important to customers?

In order to attract and retain valuable customers, communication plays an essential role. It helps to understand your customers what exactly they want.

How do you communicate effectively in business with customers?

I have two important principles to communicate with customers in an effective way, first active listening, and second politeness.