Welcome back to Viewabo’s Complete Guide to Amazing Customer Interactions, Part 2 of 3. If you missed Part 1, click here to learn about customer interaction and the type of customers you may encounter. Part 2 will continue with the stages and the different types of customer interactions.

This short series of blogs is Viewabo’s Complete Guide to Amazing Customer Interactions. As we start the new year, we want to help our readers get a great kick-off to 2023. This guide can be a launching point for you and your team to redefine what customers mean to your business and develop strategies to engage customers in more meaningful ways. 

Part 1 will cover customer interactions and the different types of customers.

Regular customers come and go, but loyal ones stay. Customer loyalty measures the likelihood of a customer doing business with a brand over an extended period. The more reliable a customer is, the stronger the emotional bond and willingness to interact and make repeat purchases. 

A natural affinity and trust develop when a customer has a good experience, eventually becoming a form of loyalty. When successfully nurtured, loyal customers can be depended on to make frequent purchases, use the products they buy, and engage in more profound ways with a brand.

Customer retention is the percentage of customers who stick with a company over a specific amount of time. This is the opposite of the churn rate, which is how many people leave in a period of time. For businesses looking to navigate through difficult times, turning to keep current customers may have a bigger impact on the bottom line than finding new customers.

Other researchers found the cost of acquiring new consumers can be 5 to 25 times costlier than retaining existing customers. In addition, capturing new customers is only successful 5-20% of the time.

Everything points to higher customer retention as much easier and more profitable than focusing on new prospects.

Why should you care about Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)?

The simple answer is profits! A Harvard Business School research report found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Customer retention helps businesses recoup the investment they make when acquiring customers. Anything beyond the initial purchase is extra sales at typically higher profit margins. Because there are almost no additional costs to the business, a higher CLTV equals more sales and profits.

Companies are adding a chat box or chatbot to their customer service offerings by popular demand. They are great tools to get in touch with a company and receive some personalized answers to quick questions. But text-based communication has some shortcomings and pitfalls that must be addressed within a company’s customer communication strategy.

As texting and instant messaging are so prevalent in our personal lives, it is easy to see why many customers prefer to text message a company from an app or website instead of calling or going in for an in-person visit. Just like how whole conversations with friends and family can be done from a consent stream of texts and emojis, customers now expect the same from businesses. Some customers prefer or have totally adopted text-base communications forgoing other types of communications, but is this the best for them?

Do you think in pictures? This phenomenon of thinking through visual processing is called visual thinking (also sometimes referred to as spatial learning or image thinking). A simple test to see if you are is to think of an idea. Do you see it in your mind as an image or a collection of images? If you do, you are actually among the majority of people who are visual thinkers, which is about 60-65% of the general population. 

People retain 80 percent of what they see, compared to 20 percent of what they read and only 10 percent of what they hear. When communicating, visual information is a powerful tool in helping the receiver understand and remember what you presented. It is even more critical for businesses as our opportunity to interact with customers is hard-earned. So much of a business’s resources go into building marketing, sales, and customer service opportunities. Each touchpoint is an important chance for businesses to put forth their best communication efforts.

There are several forms of visual information people use. In face-to-face communication, we share a lot of visual information about how we use body language, hand movements, and the angle of our heads. Eye contact, or the lack thereof, also plays a role in the information being delivered to the receiver. Besides this, other common forms of visual information are presented in visuals like pictures, videos, diagrams, charts, infographics, and drawings. These visuals act as content for the receiver to pull information, ideas, and emotions. They also work with other forms of communication, like verbal, kinesthetic, and text-based, to aid in understanding.

Successful visual communication is key if communication aims to drive the message home. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. And 65% of people are visual learners. Visual communication typically combines data visualization and graphic design to produce content and deliver information in a precise and engaging manner. It employs several mediums to reach the audience and a range of visual elements to construct a narrative.

In business, we want to engage our audiences and affect their behavior. Thus, one of the most significant decisions we make in sales and marketing is how to convey information to our audiences for this desired level of engagement. There are many forms of information to choose from, but two of the big categories are visual and textual information.

Think back to the last time you flipped through a magazine; what did you notice first? The images or the articles? Visual information includes still photography, video, animations, illustrations, graphic arts, visual aids, and so on. Text information is presented in writing, such as reports, essays, newspapers, and manuals.

Like in the example of the magazine, most of the time, both types of information are used in conjunction with each other to present to the audience a fuller picture of the message being conveyed. However, when looking at them individually, they hold different pros and cons in their usage.