Providing the best customer service has become a key target for most businesses. When clients have a great experience with the customer service of any company, they tend to stay loyal to its brand.
The standards of customer service that your business offers determine your customers’ satisfaction. Any slight customer service mistake can make clients switch to your competitors’ brands. Clients always opt to do business with companies that value and service them best.
For this reason, it is vital to know the customer service mistakes you’re making and strive to fix them. This article discusses the most common customer service mistakes for any business and the solutions to curb or do away with them.
Reasons why you need to fix customer service mistakes
Clients incline more toward companies that provide the best customer service experiences. When the level of customer service decreases, they often opt for competitors that offer better experiences. This leads to a decrease in the growth rate since profits will decrease.
The following reasons are the driving force for always fixing your customer experience mistakes.
a. Increase customer satisfaction level
When clients have a smooth experience with your customer service team, with fewer or no mistakes, they become more satisfied with the services you offer.
b. Increase customer retention rate
Customers love quality customer service. The better the quality of the service, the higher the chances of these clients sticking to the brands of the same company. Customers will always choose the company that offers value.
c. Increase in overall performance of a company
An increase in customer satisfaction leads to client loyalty to a company. This translates to an assured increase in the way the business performs as profits increase.
d. Improve business reputation on online platforms
Clients are the best free marketers of any business since they have actual experience with the company. When their customer service experience is good, they will recommend it to others. Equally, if the level of customer service is poor, they will discourage others from doing business with the company.
The main customer service mistakes
Companies strive to provide exemplary customer service to their clients. However, mistakes are bound to happen that will make clients not have the best experience. These customer service mistakes include:
1. Not actively listening to customers
Having great active listening skills is key in customer service. Support agents should listen and consider the opinions, complaints, and suggestions of your clients. This will help them to get insight into what these clients prefer or need. This will in turn make clients feel valued and increase their satisfaction as they will feel heard. For this reason, the support team should listen and take the right and necessary actions.
In addition, support agents should also listen keenly in order to provide the right answers or responses to clients’ questions or concerns. This will ensure continued customer satisfaction.
2. Not training your customer support team often leading to customer service mistakes
One common customer experience mistake is lack of proper, adequate, and regular training for agents. When the support team has limited resources to which they can refer, it renders them somewhat incompetent. They often fail to get the right solutions for client issues and might respond with wrong information.
Agents need regular training on how to interact and handle customers and their issues in a proper way. Companies need to teach and empower their agents with the right knowledge on all processes. This will ensure they serve the clients while being informed. This will leave clients more satisfied with the customer experience.
In addition, agents can be taught how to interact with clients in a courteous, friendly, and professional manner, which will increase their confidence in the business.
3. Failing to deliver what you promised
It is said, “A promise made is a promise kept.” The customer service mistake made by most businesses is that they fail to deliver as per their promises. When you make a commitment with a client to deliver within a given period, make sure to follow through. If your product description cites that it performs certain functions, ensure that is exactly what it does. If you say that you offer a given service, ensure the quality is as good as you have mentioned, if not better. Failure to deliver what you promised reduces the level of trust that a client has in a business. It also disappoints and leaves the client less satisfied with the customer service.
4. Passing clients around from one agent to another many times
Tossing clients from one support agent to the next can be very upsetting and frustrating to them. Unfortunately, this is a common practice among most businesses. Clients often get reassigned to different agents in an effort to resolve their issue. This can go on till the agent with the abilities to provide the right solution is identified. Clients get frustrated since the issue takes more time to resolve or get a response. Thus, customer satisfaction is reduced.
In addition, passing clients around makes them assume that the agents are not skilled enough. This might make them opt for competitors. For this reason, it is vital to have a workflow that is well defined to avoid this customer service mistake. One solution can be to have an automated workflow, which helps to define the roles and duties of each support agent and the right agents for each issue.
5. Lack of proactive customer support solutions
Good customer service entails being preemptive in how you offer solutions to problems. Agents should reach out to clients first and take all the necessary measures to avoid future mishaps before they happen. However, one customer service mistake is that some support agents are usually unable to predict and resolve customer issues on time.
Agents need to know what the clients need even before they reach out or inquire about anything. This helps to keep clients in the loop on the current events of a business. As a result, it increases customer satisfaction.
6. Unavailable for customers at the time they need assistance
One of the customer service mistakes made by the agents is not being present at all times to provide clients with the support they need. Customers prefer fast responses and resolutions. Most companies have clients located in different time zones.
For companies that have a defined work schedule this becomes an issue for their clients in other time zones. This is because their chances of reaching the support team before they leave will be low and limited. As a result, their issues go unresolved longer than expected and urgent issues become pain points. They might then shift to competitors that have a customer service team that is always present.
This calls for a 24/7 support in order to assist all clients wherever they are, at any time. This will result in increased customer satisfaction and experience due to availability and fast response time.
7. Not offering personalized customer service experiences
Every customer service experience should be unique and customized to address each specific customer issue. Clients prefer businesses that offer personalized customer service. One customer experience mistake is to not consider what each client needs and prefers. Failure to offer a personal experience reduces customer satisfaction levels. In addition, clients do not feel valued. Each interaction between a client and a support agent should have an added personal touch to it.
8. Delays in providing support to customers
When clients contact a support team for whatever reason, they always expect a quick response. This is not always the case. At times, the support team makes the customer service mistake of not answering the clients fast enough. These delays can either be putting the clients on hold for too long or ignoring the clients completely. When the support agents fail to or delay to provide updates on the progress of an issue’s resolution, that counts as a mistake too.
This is a wrong gesture, as it portrays that you don’t care about the clients and their pain points. This greatly reduces your clients’ satisfaction. As a result, they end up shifting to competitors who care more about them.
9. Choosing and using the wrong communication channels
Customers reach out to the support team using different channels based on what they prefer. With the evolving digital communication channels, most companies need to adapt and use different ones to interact with their clients. If the options for contacting support agents for assistance are limited, clients are bound to be frustrated.
Companies can choose several communication channels that most of their clients use in order to make their services easily accessible. These can include options such as emails and social media platforms. These will improve the customer experience because customers can have easy access to the company’s support team.
10. Not storing and reviewing customer data history
When dealing with many customers, it is important to store and review the data history from any interaction. However, this has been a major issue since most companies fail to keep records of previous interactions with customers. As a result, clients are forced to repeat all the information that had previously been mentioned. This proves to be very hectic for clients and time consuming. This reduces their level of satisfaction.
Conclusion
Provide the best customer experience and increase your customers’ loyalty, trust, and level of satisfaction by avoiding common customer service mistakes. Identify the mistakes your support team makes and look for possible solutions to counter them for the best customer service.
With BoldDesk, offer your customers the best customer service. Try the BoldDesk free trial package and counter all possible customer service mistakes. If you have any questions, contact the BoldDesk support team.
