Posted by Mistakes made in the customer service department can adversely affect your business. The impact might not be too big on its own for a single mistake; but, it can become a hurdle for your company’s growth over time. For instance, you can end up losing your repeat customers or have to face the music when your customers post negative reviews online.
What are customer service things to avoid, and how can you work on correcting customer service mistakes? Let’s find out!
Common Customer Service Mistakes
1. Making Customers Use A Particular Service Channel
From a customer’s perspective, selecting the form of communication is a powerful moment. Not everyone prefers to use the same channel; that is why forcing them all to rely on a single one – for instance, email, chat, or call – can alienate them. This is a common customer service mistake.
What if they are in a noisy room and can’t call you? What if they don’t have enough time to write up a detailed email? What if the issue that they are facing is too significant to explain over chat?
Putting it simply, when you force your customers to choose a single form of communication, the conversation will start on the wrong foot. This leads to more problems for the customer service representative who’s going to handle the client.
The Solution?
As far as correcting customer service mistakes go, this particular customer service mistake can be fixed by offering your customers the ability to choose from different channels. This is also known as omnichannel communication.
A lot of the companies rely on a customer hub that can keep track of all the conversations happening on different channels. This helps them to keep up with communication while offering customers different ways to connect with your customer service team. While we’re on the topic of omnichannel communication, you should also focus on omnichannel marketing for maximum effectiveness.
2. Offering Tiered Customer Service
When you are using tiered customer service, you’re only making it difficult for your customer to find the right help at the time of their choosing. Previously, all customer service requests used to commence at the lowest tier and then get advanced up and up the chain of command until the customer’s problem was resolved or reached the highest possible tier of the service.
The tiered approach was primarily employed to cut down costs by ensuring that experienced and higher paid customer service representatives were dealing with only the complex issues that demanded their attention. However, it has serious flaws. It causes a delay in ticket resolution and results in creating a poor customer experience. Furthermore, it also restricts your customer service team members from learning from their colleagues.
How Do You Fix It?
Try implementing the collaborative customer service approach in your business instead of using a tiered customer service approach. If an issue proves to be too intricate for one of your customer service representatives to handle, they should be able to bring in a more experienced peer to help. Also, this will allow the customer service representative to learn from their experienced peer.
3. Reactive Approach With Your Customer Service
Companies facing a higher number of customer churn are guilty of committing this common customer service mistake. The outdated way of approaching customer service was to have your phone number mentioned on the website and then wait for people to call. However, this leads to many dissatisfied customers staying silent until the relationship goes beyond repair.
There’s a high number of businesses that close every year because the significant customer conversations never take place even though they have a customer service team in place waiting for their customers to call.
What’s The Solution?
Instead of taking the reactive approach, opt for being proactive when it comes to your customer service efforts.
You should strive to take control of the conversation as opposed to waiting for the phone to ring. You can rely on customer service software to see how long it has been since a customer has interacted with your customer service team. If it has been a while, you can have one of your customer service representatives reach out.
By taking the proactive approach, you’re showing your customers that you care about them!
4. Not Offering Consistent Customer Service Experiences
You might have all of the required tools and staff members, but if you’re not consistent, then it’s all going to waste. What does it mean to be consistent in the customer service experiences that you’re offering?
Let’s suppose you contact a company for an issue, and it takes you about five minutes to get connected with an agent. The next day, you try connecting for the same issue, but it takes you twenty minutes to connect with an agent.
This is an example of inconsistent customer service experiences. Your customers want reliability and predictability in their interactions with your business. This becomes particularly crucial when they are facing issues.
How Do You Avoid It?
You need to create realistic expectations between your business and your customers. You should take out the time to outline support expectations to ensure that a healthy customer relationship is maintained.
What’s important here is to understand that you don’t need grand gestures. For instance, even an automated email about your customer’s ticket can go a long way in letting your customers know that you are here to help them out.
You can also incorporate SLAs (Service Level Agreements) to ensure that your customers have a clear idea of how long it will take you to sort out their issues. When you fail to meet these SLAs, you have to offer your customers a form of compensation.
Should These Mistakes Even Be Happening?
In a nutshell, customer service mistakes are inevitable. However, that doesn’t imply that you shouldn’t work on preventing customer service mistakes where you can. Check out the following actions you can take to avoid these customer service mistakes;
Keep Yourself Open To Feedback
The ideal situation would be that you’re able to find out about your mistakes before it’s too late to do anything about them. How can you do that?
You need to provide your customers with ways to raise their concerns, start a dialogue with your company. The best way to do it is by reaching out to your customers and requesting them to complete customer feedback surveys. This can help you identify their pain points and work on improving them.
Focus On Your Employees’ Training
When you don’t plan, you are gearing up for failure. Companies often fail because their employees aren’t up for the tasks assigned to them. How do you fix it?
You need to start by focusing on your training techniques so that your customer service team polishes its skills and keeps on acquiring new ones. You can use the data collected from customer feedback to help you improve your training manual and regularly update it.
Offer 24/7 Self-Service Options
Most of your customers would be happy to avail self-service options. This can be anything from a knowledge base that you can accompany with chatbots, FAQ pages, product trainings, question and answer forums, or simply offering order tracking for better post-purchase experience.
It helps you in more than one way, actually. Your customers will be able to resolve their issues whether your customer service team is available or not. During your working hours, the load on your customer service team will be greatly reduced.
To Sum It All Up…
In conclusion, most businesses do make customer service mistakes. However, what matters is how quickly you move towards correcting customer service mistakes and ensuring that they don’t happen again. You need to create a system that enables you to stay on top of things. For instance, you can use a customer hub that allows you to implement omnichannel communication while ensuring that all communication is available in a single place. Be proactive and take the first step in resolving your customer issues, thus creating a service experience that is personal and consistent.
Remember, customer service mistakes are bound to happen. However, you should do your best to ensure that you eliminate the common customer service mistakes while working on improving your customer experience.
With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. Now introducing Social listening. Try it for free.