If your customers believe your customer service provision is hard work, time consuming and stressful, or if they are made to feel like a number and not a person, then you and your business are in for a lot of negative word of mouth.
Customer expectations are always changing and are becoming increasingly demanding, and you and your business cannot afford to be complacent.
To succeed, you need to regularly upgrade the way you deal with disappointed customers.
In this social media-obsessed world in which we live, dissatisfied and angry customers can impact on your revenues and profits negatively and can leave you running around trying to patch up the problem.
Instead, be proactive, stand out from your competition and focus on making your customer issue resolution EASY for your customer. This has a measurable return on investment in the form of recommendations, repeat purchases and positive word of mouth.
Here are 4 helping hands to get you started:
1. Make your customer service priorities clear to your people.
The focus needs to be on making it as effortless as possible for your customers to resolve their issues – don’t just try to wow them with kindness and over-the-top solutions. Customers want practical, simple, effortless resolution.
2. Minimise channel switching.
You will lose customers if they have to go from your website to the phone and then, when on the phone, get passed from department to department. This will be made worse if they must continually repeat their details and explain their issue. Let’s face it – this has happened to all of us at some point, and it’s infuriating.
3. Manage future issues at the same time.
First Contact Resolution is a worthy goal. All customers want their issue to be solved the first time they contact you, but it’s not enough. To go one better, you can anticipate what the next issue is going to be and prevent it from happening, which will mean the customer does not have to contact you again.
4. Improve your team’s skills at framing customer experience.
Customer experience engineering is more than just good soft skills. These are skills that your team must master. They need to tailor the service interaction towards the customer, use the right language, actively offer solutions and guide them towards a mutually beneficial solution by understanding their state of mind, the situation they are in and their needs.
