Customer-Centric Messaging: The Complete Guide

What Is Customer-Centric Messaging?

Customer-centric messaging is the messaging that puts your customers at the heart of your business to deliver personalized, engaging, and positive relationships. Being a customer-centric business means putting your customer at the top of your mind.

What does this mean exactly? It means you:

• understand your audience
• anticipate their needs
• know how to communicate messages
• know their preferred channels of communications
• when it’s best to reach customers

Think of customer centricity as a strategy that ingrains the customer into every business decision. Successful organizations that want high retention rates, up-scale existing products, more conversions, premium prices, and ultimately, higher revenues will adopt a customer-centric strategy.

Why Is Customer Centric Messaging Important to Brands?

Companies that use customer-centric messaging are more profitable because it delivers more positive experiences. Did you know that it takes 12 positive experiences with a brand to make up for 1 unresolved negative experience?

Positive conversational messaging experiences can mean you let your customers know of a change in the order delivery. Or it means you let them know when their favourite products are back in stock. Another example includes exceptional customer service. To be available 24/7 means a lot of automation that can solve customer inquiries fast.

By implementing chatbots in your customer-centric messaging doesn’t mean replacing human agents, therefore the human touch. It means you can answer and solve customer queries at any time of the day, even outside business hours.

Allowing agents to focus on more complex tasks results in higher customer engagement rates because you offer more attention to clients who need extra help.

Customer-Centric Messaging First Steps

Customer-centric messaging is crucial for successful client interactions. Regardless of the communication channel, you should develop a roadmap for successful customer journeys.

Map Out Customer Interactions
Map out the whole brand-customer interaction and identify ways where you can stand out from your competition.

Start with onboarding your customers and go through each customer lifecycle to guarantee exceptional customer engagement. In the retail industry, churn is when customers stop buying and become inactive after a time. To lower customer churn, segment customer audiences so you can tailor messages for each group.

Create Personalized Messages
Create messages that address your customer’s needs. Be relatable, engaging, and help them solve an issue or experience a positive engagement with your brand.

For instance, when you send a discount code, know which products your customer is interested in. Collect data around their preferences, style, age, favourite colour, and price range. Include their name, details of the order, and engaging content such as digital scratch cards.

Adopt A Multichannel Communication Strategy
Be on all the channels you can be. Nowadays, successful companies invest in a multichannel strategy. They offer live chat support, are on multiple social media platforms, they use phone communications, texts, emails, and SMS marketing to engage with their users.

The benefit of including multiple channels in your strategy is that customers are more receptive to businesses that communicate this way.

7 Questions to Ask When Planning Customer-Centric Messaging

1. Will this message help my customer?
2. Is this a good time to send it?
3. Does the message include self-serve options?
4. Is the message personalized to my customer’s expectations?
5. Is this message built with empathy?
6. Will this message positively impact my customer?
7. Can my customer contact me directly if needed?

Source: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/de/Documents/WM%20Digitalisierung.pdf

How to Measure the Impact of Customer-Centric Messaging?

Customer expectations have changed. The younger generations have an intolerance when it comes to poorly used digital communications. Customers expect faster responses, polite agents, humanized bots, and new channels versus traditional channels.

Customer-centric messaging is tailored to the prospect’s needs and wants, not the company’s or salesperson’s. The real impact of customer-centric messaging can be measured by customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and revenue.

Some of the metrics that will help you measure customer-centric messaging success are:

• Net Promoter Scores – designed to help you identify the customers most likely to promote and refer you to other people.
• Customer Satisfaction Scores – sent typically after a customer interaction to rate your customer’s satisfaction.
• Customer Effort Score – this survey focuses on a specific part of the customer journey or experience. Did your customer service team go the extra mile to help your customer?
• First Contact Resolution – related to how quickly you can resolve a query; were they more channels and interactions involved?

Conclusion

It’s time to add customer-centric messaging to your communication strategy. Product or solution personalization means research into matching your product’s characteristics to your customers’ preferences. Apply these factors and you will communicate the right message to the right customer at the right time, on the right channel.

Customer-centric messaging establishes the entire engagement that your brand has with your prospects and customers. If you speak the same language, then you are in for the long run that is rare in the competitive industries that we are in today.

If you are interested to send more relevant messaging to a wider customer list, on multiple channels, contact our team and we will show you our most valuable tools.