Most businesses work hard to provide excellent customer service. If you run a smaller business, this may be one of the few ways you actually gain a competitive edge.
It’s important to understand what might have a negative effect on the quality of your customer service. Here’s a look at seven factors that could be hurting your overall customer service experience.
Lack of Training for Customer Service Team
Whether your customer service comes in the form of support after the purchase or sales before the purchase, a lack of training may be causing poor customer service overall. With a fully trained staff of great customer service agents, you have a much better chance of providing great customer service. However, a lack of training may lead to slower responses, the need to transfer customers without solving the issue and many other problems.
Don’t Use Technology Properly
The proper use of technology makes a big difference. If you’re not offering the support and service channels your customer’s desire, it could be a big part of your customer service issue. This can especially be an issue when your competitors already offer what you don’t.
For example, if you’re in the web hosting industry, you need to offer multiple channels of technical support. If you don’t, it will cause more customer service issues than it will solve. Make sure you’re using technology properly or you could be in for bigger issues.
Lack of Social Media Activity
While it may not seem important to you, it’s very important to your customers. Social media has become an avenue for customer service, support and for reaching potential customers. IF you’re not using it very much, it could cause issues.
Your customers probably share both good and bad stories on social media. You need to be paying attention as this is the new form of word of mouth, which can spread like wildfire in a matter of moments. Make sure you’re using social media properly or it could be the death of your business.
Not Available 24/7 and Immediately
Customers don’t like to wait in today’s consumer and instant society. When they contact support, they want answers and they want them fast. The worst thing is to have an irritated customers get greeted by a chat bot, auto-response email or recording on the phone. They want a live person ready to help them and they want it now.
If you’re not available 24/7, especially in the hosting industry, you’re losing. Customer service starts to suffer as soon as you don’t provide the necessary availability, along with the immediate response and answer. When you’re available to assist customer and you’re actually there, they become far more loyal to your company.
Don’t Value Loyal Customers
Your customer service takes a huge hit if you don’t value your current loyal customers. It’s seen in the cell phone industry all the time when they offer new customers a great deal, but refuse to do much for existing customers. Don’t do this or you could become a company customers use until someone else offers a better deal.
Taking the time to reward loyal customers will make a difference. It’s far easier and less expensive to keep a current customer than to find a new one to replace them. Make sure you’re doing everything you can to reward and keep your loyal customers.
Burned Out Employees
As soon as employees working in customer service start to get burned out, you will suffer customer service issues as a company. They will start to take negativity in a different way and won’t have the same level of commitment to the customer.
You can help to avoid employee burnout by not overworking employees or having them do something outside of customer interaction for part of the week. Everybody gets burned out if they are constantly dealing with negative customers with complaints. Make sure you put things in place to help keep employees from getting burned out.
Lack of Teamwork
When your customer service workers don’t work as a team, it causes lower quality customer service. They have to collaborate and work together or it could become a huge issue. There’s nothing worse than getting transferred over and over just to repeat what you just told the last customer service representative.
By taking good notes on the conversations and reading them before asking questions of the customers, you can improve this process. Teamwork matters and your customer service reps have to work together.
There are several things that could be causing harm to your customer service. However, most of these issues can be avoided simply by making sure you’re aware of them and putting things in place to ensure great customer service. If you take these seven factors into account, you’ll provide better overall customer service.