The best customer service experience is something that every business should strive for. We’ve said this a billion times, and it seems, we’ll say this a billion times more, until doomsday or perhaps beyond. But, it’s the truth. Your customer service is what your company is judged for when the chips are down. Your product can be great, your company can be trendy and cool and reputable. But if your customer experience is bad, it wrecks the whole effect instantly and permanently.
Did you know that people dissatisfied with their customer service experience tell twice or three times more people about their poor experience than those who had good experience? This means news of bad experience and poor reputation spread like wildfire, and are impossible to contain.
So, you need to ensure the best customer service experience you can muster happens as often as possible. How can you do this?
We’ve been over this a billion times, but I suppose it bears repeating again. The first thing to do is to make the call as pleasant as you possibly can. It’s always going to be terrible, and there’s nothing that can be done to make it truly pleasant. But, reducing hold times, eliminating advertisements being repeated constantly during what hold times there are, are a big step to making this far less awful.
Along with this, eliminating the complex phone menus and reliance on speech recognition that just doesn’t work properly is also a great step in the proper direction.
Along with this, spreading to other channels for handling things is a good way to reduce the bottleneck that makes hold times so bad, and it also gives people more ways to handle contacting you, given some people don’t like phones or voice conversations in the first place.
Along with that, the attitude is a big thing to factor in. A positive, sympathetic attitude with upset customers is a big thing to make sure you focus on providing. Customers are already upset by whatever issues they have, and being inconvenienced by having to contact customer service is just adding to it.
So, they will think highly of agents who show an understanding of this inconvenience, and are contrite over the whole thing happening. Angry customers require a delicate hand, and showing an eagerness to make the customer happy above and beyond monetary concerns is very important.
What else can you do to help this along beyond these things we’ve no said a hundred times? Well, encouraging self service is the way of the future. Along with multi channel customer service, empowering the customer to handle problems on their own using onboard software and guidance software is going to make customer service much easier in the future.
The best customer service experience starts with actually taking to heart the things we’ve said here and many other times, and to embrace the customer self service revolution that’s just now starting to really get going. Don’t just gloss over this, actually start applying these principles, because it seems like nobody listens when we and many others make these recommendations, and that’s why we continue to cite this time and time again.
