Cures for bad customer service
Customer serivce training is increasing by the day. Every organization is concerned about retaining old customers and winning over new ones. Customer service is the frontier where major organizations will compete in the future, especially if they provide similar products and services. How they serve the customer might be the only way they can differentiate what they do.
Types of customer service:
Here is my working list of 8 types of customer service. Note that I’m making
these up as I go along.1. High Touch Customer Service
This is a popular style of customer service in high-end stores. There’s a well refined script that involves approaching customers when they enter and saying something they can agree with (e.g. “isn’t it a nice day?”), wandering off and straightening things, then watching them and re-approaching when they express interest in something and proceeding with a soft-sell. When done correctly this leads to great experiences for customers and companies.
2. Low Touch Customer Service
No assistance at all unless you want to make a return, then they just take the item back and give you your money. Strangely this strategy can breed more loyalty than high-touch service, probably because it is often combined with super low prices.
Online example: Google, where it is nearly impossible to get in touch with a human employee but nobody seems to mind.
3. Bad Touch Customer Service
This is the bastard cousin of 1 and 2. Employees are in the store but are not helpful. They follow you around and try to make sales but don’t actually have the information or authority to provide good service. This is often the result of commission based pay for medium to low priced goods. Making returns is impossible, and customer loyalty takes a back seat to this week’s sales. I bet the bathroom in this place is disgusting.
4. Transparent Customer Service
You can see exactly how things are working and are welcome to manage things at the level you like. You can talk to the customer service and get the product exactly as you like it.
5. Understanding but Inflexible Customer Service
This is sometimes a hard one to spot. The customer service person listens to you, tries to understand your problem, acknowledges how frustrating it is, then tells you that the company is prepared to do absolutely nothing to remedy the situation.
6. Clueless Customer Service
This one is frighteningly common, especially in call centers. The Customer Service person is given no training whatsoever, and is generally reading from a set script. They don’t work for the company, don’t understand the product, don’t use the product, and are primarily judged by how fast they can get you off the phone. You can never get the same person twice, so you have to re-describe your problem to each person. If your question is outside the set scripts they can do literally nothing for you.
7. Evil Customer Service
It isn’t nice to call people (or even companies) evil, but this strategy is certainly evil. The goal is to trick customers into paying more or agreeing to something by using extremely specific language and refusing to stop talking. It sounds like they’re saying one thing when they’re actually saying another. Rather than doing what you ask they bully you into doing what the company wants.
8. Perfect Customer Service
. When you call them a human answers every time, and it’s the same person who helps me in the branch office, who always knows exactly how to solve any problem. If I’m in danger of overdrawing my account they call me and let me know. They send a messenger to pick up deposits. When you go there in the morning they have fresh snacks. When customers find one of these you find one of these companies they hold onto it with all there might.
Nine ways to improve
your customer satisfaction
“The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” Jerry Gregoire, CIO of Dell Computers
In a business world where customer acquisition costs are sky-rocketing, small and medium businesses must focus on building a customer experience to increase customer satisfaction.
Here are nine game-changing ideas to help you
1. Treat your customers like they are your boss
Your customer is your salary. With no customers, there’s nobody to pay you! By taking this approach to every customer interaction you can naturally flip the angle on customer service.Picture yourself as the boss… if your employee treated every customer the way they treated you, how good would the service be!
Here are some of the approaches we recommend businesses use:
- Thank all your customers for their business
- Go out your way to help customers
- Try to impress your customers as if you want a pay raise
- Think about your salary every time you talk to a customer
- Keep your promises and integrity
2. Focus on measuring customer satisfaction
Did you know that 91% of your unhappy customers will never purchase services from you again? Measuring customer satisfaction can help you reduce the number of unhappy customers.So how do you measure customer satisfaction?
3. Build customer loyalty to increase customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.- Jeffrey Gitomer
I agree with Jeffery and have included four ways to build customer loyalty to increase customer satisfaction:
- Remember special occasions like birthdays
- Strive to empower and educate customers
- Top level managers must lead from the front with customer service
- Talk to your customers, tap into what they want and deliver
4. Avoid making these customer retention mistakes
No business is immune to unhappy customers. In fact, even companies with the best customer service in the world will still lose up to 9% of their customers to competitors.The good news is you can do something to stop customers defecting. Here are three common customer retention mistakes that are killing your customer satisfaction:
- You are ignoring customer feedback
- You are taking customer feedback too personally
- You are using long, boring customer feedback surveys
5. Set customer expectations early
Setting expectations too high is a common mistake a lot of businesses (and salespeople) make when bringing on new business.If you’re like most businesses, you’ve probably had the over promising salesperson.
For those who still have these wild ones, my advice – get them in line! They are killing your customer satisfaction by setting expectations too high!
We recommend under promising and over delivering.
There’s no better feeling than as a customer to have your expectations exceeded.
6. Learn how to survey your customers the right way
A customer feedback survey is the best way to find out how satisfied your customers are, find ways to improve your product or service, and identify customer advocates who really love your product.7. Communication marketing is the best way to increase customer satisfaction
59% of B2B marketers believe communication marketing is still the most effective channel in generating revenue.If it’s so good for marketers, why don’t we use it more to increase customer satisfaction?
8. Tap into social media to track and monitor customer satisfaction so you can keep your customers happy
With your customers now using their mobile phones up to 150 times per day, it’s important to recognize that they might turn to social media to leave their customer complaints
Your job is to make sure you use social media monitoring tools to keep track of positive and negative feedback, and resolve them accordingly.
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