Bad customer service experiences cost businesses billions every year. No matter what you sell, you’ll struggle in doing so if your customer service skills are lacking. Treating customers well is usually the difference between earning brand loyalty and pushing consumers away. Even one negative experience with your brand will impact your reputation. Unfortunately, no company is perfect, so mistakes often happen.
To offer a great customer experience, here are six to avoid.
1. Having Too Few Employees
All customers hate waiting. Regardless of whether you’re stuck on hold or standing in a queue, the experience is frustrating.
Because of this, you must have enough employees. When your customer service team is too small to cope with demand, it impacts the business overall. Make sure you employ extra staff during busy periods, like Christmas, to make an efficient experience.
2. Missing Any Contact Details
Social media, live chat, and other platforms have transformed customer-business relationships. These tools allow you to offer consumers a greater convenience than ever before. Unfortunately, this means, when that convenience isn’t offered, it causes problems.
Many ventures forget to display, or hide, their contact details. Missing these details will impact customer relationships.
3. Allowing Poor Product Quality
Customers trust that a business will only sell goods of high quality. By doing the opposite, you will break that trust. For this reason, you must ensure that you only send out quality products.
A great measure of quality is weight, so use a precision scale to verify the correct weight of goods on sale. Focus groups can test your products too. After doing so, they will offer helpful feedback.
4. Ignoring Self-Service Options
Although it’s important to have customer service staff available, you must understand that consumers won’t always want to speak to them. Instead, many people would prefer to help themselves first. A FAQs page would allow them to do that. There are also many other resources you could offer, including buying guides, how-to videos, and user manuals.
5. Deleting Bad Customer Reviews
Reading negative comments from customers certainly isn’t enjoyable. However, that doesn’t mean you should delete them. Responding to this feedback correctly will benefit your business much more. Apologizing for any mistakes and suggesting ways you could do better is much more effective. When you delete comments, it shows you’re untrustworthy and don’t care.
6. Being Rude To Customers
Rudeness is never acceptable in business, especially towards customers. Although certain consumers can be troublesome, you can’t argue with them. This will only make a bad situation much worse. Making new customers costs much more than retaining current ones.
That is why you shouldn’t tolerate bad behavior from anyone in your workforce, particularly customer service staff.
Without happy customers, a business can’t survive. After all, you must generate a profit to cover overheads and stay afloat. While there are countless ways to keep customers happy, there are even more mistakes that push them away. To improve customer service in your business, make sure that you avoid the huge blunders listed above.
© New To HR