Communicating Digitally: Important Guidelines for Interacting Online

Online communication has become a major part of our daily lives. Whether for personal reasons, customer service, or business, online communicating digitally is as ubiquitous as face-to-face communication.

But have you ever thought about effective online communication? 

When you are communicating for business purposes, you want to make sure that you are doing your best in interacting with your customers.

So what are the guidelines for interacting online?

We’ve put together this detailed guide to teach you the best ways to communicate with your customers online.

The Comprehensive Guidelines for Interacting Online

Particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic, we have given greater importance to online communication. If this affects you, we’d recommend reading this post to learn about the importance of communication during an uncertain time.

Here’s what we suggest you do to improve your online communication:

Manners and Netiquette

When you meet someone in person, you observe the usual good manners. You greet them, ask them how they are doing, and perhaps engage in “small talk” before getting to the point of your meeting.

This should be replicated in the digital sphere.

When your customer reaches out to you, it is usually to resolve an issue. They may feel stressed or overwhelmed. After all, they are eager to resolve a problem.

But you still need to greet them and ask a “how are you?” before jumping into your response. These basic manners are all part of ‘netiquette’ and they make all the difference in retaining your customers’ loyalty.

Tone

This is a tough one! Both written communication and online communication have to be presented in a way to demonstrate the right tone.

When dealing with your customers, you want to make sure that you are always polite. You want to appear calm and collected. For example, when writing you need to AVOID ALL CAPS AS THEY ARE RUDE!

If you’re speaking through an audio or video call application, you want to imagine that the person is near you. Look forward to them directly; make sure you do not raise your voice. 

It’s also imperative to speak/write with clarity and with proper grammar and syntax. Not doing this gives the impression that you do not care about your customer’s concerns.

Importance of Language

As we touched upon in the previous tip, language has to be given importance when communicating with your customers. 

Among the guidelines to follow, you should avoid any technical jargon. Your customers need to understand. If you have to provide them with instructions that may include technical jargon, make sure to translate this to layman’s terms.

Make sure to write out acronyms at least once so that your customer doesn’t have to look up what the acronym is.

You also want to break up your text. Whether communicating through live chat or an email, you want short sentences and paragraphs. This makes it easier for your customer to process the information presented.

Use spell checkers, grammar checkers, and a service such as HemingwayApp.com to help to make your writing more clear.

Detailed Information

When communicating with your customers online, you want to provide them with detailed information in your response.

This doesn’t mean that you can get away with long-winded sentences; on the contrary, you should aim to remain concise. But even with concise writing or speaking, you can provide detailed information.

For example, if your customer needs help with an issue, your first goal should be to provide clear and detailed instructions on how to resolve this issue. You may also wish to provide additional information on how to avoid this problem in the future.

You also want to end your communication by asking the customer if they need additional help. Do not assume that once you’ve answered their question that your work is complete.

Your customer may not understand your original instructions and may request more details. You should always give them an option to follow-up and be willing to continually help them until the matter is resolved.

Keeping Your Cool

This should be discussed more often in customer support training sessions. When dealing with online interactions, one cannot always expect the other party to be polite and courteous. Not everyone will take the advice in this guide!

You have to find a way to govern your temper when dealing with an irate customer. This ensures that you can calm them down and retain your customer. This can create customer loyalty, which ensures that your business continues to succeed.

If you find that a customer has written a rude email in which they express their frustration at an issue, you must avoid responding rudely. Your response should start with the basic “hello, thank you for getting in touch.” Afterward, you should offer an apology (even if you had nothing to do with the issue) and assure the customer that you will resolve the issue.

Only after this preamble should you break into resolving the issue. Whether you are writing an email or engaging in live chat or even a video/audio call, you must keep your cool and remain professional.

This is, undoubtedly, one of the most challenging aspects of interacting online. It’s no secret that comments, message boards, and social media can have some of the most toxic interactions.

But you are not going to resort to this low level.

Make sure to observe the rules of good manners. For successful online communication, imagine that the person you are communicating with is sitting across a table in a cafe with you. This visualization alone will alter how you communicate with them.

Continue to Communicate

Now that you know the guidelines for interacting online, you are ready to put these tips into practice for your business. If you have a staff of customer support agents, we strongly recommend that they use this guide as a template for future interactions.

Be sure to read our other content for more advice on customer acquisition, digital marketing, and online business.