Now more than ever, customers have come to value their overall experience with a brand as much as they value the quality and price of the products that the brand offers. In fact, 73 percent of consumers agree that customer experience plays an important role in their purchasing decisions.

While there's a lot that goes into developing an excellent customer experience, creating meaningful dialogue with your customers is the ideal place to start. Let's take a look at a few helpful tips to help improve those conversations.

Active listening is the process of giving your full attention to what the customer is saying while providing verbal and non-verbal cues to demonstrate that you hear and understand them. When it comes to creating meaningful dialogue with customers, listening attentively and showing the customer that you are doing so is an excellent place to begin.

No one likes to be treated like just another number. While it isn't easy to personalize interactions when you don't have access to detailed customer data, even something as simple as making an effort to call them by their names can go a long way toward making your customers feel appreciated.

Encouraging your customers to offer feedback will yield two key benefits. For one, feedback can be an incredibly valuable resource, providing insights that you could use to further improve the customer experience. Encouraging people to give honest feedback also demonstrates that your brand genuinely cares about what they have to say.

Words have a lot of power, so it's important to choose them carefully. Even if the message itself is not inherently negative, negative language triggers negative emotions. If the message itself is actually negative (for example, telling a customer that you won't be able to offer a refund), then it is even more important to deliver it using positive language.

Let's take a look at a few examples of negative vs. positive language:

• Instead of saying, "We won't be able to ship your order until payment has cleared," try saying, "As soon as your payment has cleared, we'll be able to ship your order."
• Instead of saying, "I'm sorry you're having this problem," try saying, "I would be happy to help you fix this."
• nstead of saying, "Please do not reply to this message as the mailbox isn't monitored," try saying, "Please feel free to contact us at..."

Making an effort to replace negative words with positive language like the examples above will help ensure that you cultivate positive emotions and reactions instead of negative ones.

While it's important to maintain a certain degree of professionalism, you don't want to make your customers feel like they're speaking to a robot. A little humor and some off-script remarks will surely be appreciated when used appropriately.

Just be sure that you are delivering these doses of humor and personality at the right times. For instance, a customer who is obviously frustrated probably isn't going to be in the mood for jokes and lighthearted remarks.