Providing awesome customer service gives businesses a competitive edge over their rivals. Customers who experience good customer service feel more comfortable approaching businesses for a repeat purchase and spend on average 33% more than new customers. When customers are educated, supported and trained by an excellent customer support staff, they tend to spread positive messages about the company, which attract new customers who are four times more likely to buy. Conversely, 89% of consumers stop doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service.
Most companies think they provide an above average customer experience, but in reality fail to live up to their own expectation. An often-referenced study by the office of White House Consumer Affairs found that while 80% of companies in its study believed they deliver superior customer service, only a scanty 8% of their customers agreed with them. The best way to overcome this disparity between perception and reality is to send out a feedback form after interacting with your customers. This eliminates the guesswork needed to figure out if and how the organization can improve its customer service experience.
Here are the 3 common customer service mistakes and ways to overcome them:
Long wait times
It goes without saying – long wait and hold times frustrate customers, sometimes to the extent that they choose another provider. Support managers should identify the causes for the process slow-down and take measures to overcome them. For instance, when support reps use standalone help desk software that does not integrate with other systems that store needed customer data, they will have to go looking for it in those other systems. As a result, customers are kept waiting while the support reps are collecting all the necessary data to provide a solution.
Using a CRM solution like Vtiger can reduce this delay. Vtiger acts as a single customer data repository which has the entire purchase and relationship history of all customers. Tight integration with email, telephony services, and social channels helps sales reps provide multi-channel customer service where customers don’t have to keep repeating their problem increasing their frustration. Vtiger’s customer portal even lets businesses set up a self service knowledge base for their customers to get quick answers to commonly encountered problems.
Passing customers instead of issues across departments:
When customers get in touch with a support rep they expect him/her to solve the problem, and not redirect them to another agent to narrate their frustration all over again. Sometimes, to provide the best solutions, customer issues are escalated to the most qualified agent or department. However, the business should have a working process where customer issues can be escalated where customers don’t have to call back or repeatedly tell their story.
While Vtiger gives your support team the power to access complete customer data to provide the best solution, it also enables support reps to transfer customer calls to a particular agent or to other departments, so that customers don’t have to do any extra work. Customers will not have to repeat themselves as the agent or department receiving the transferred call will also have full access to the customer’s previous engagements including the current issue.
Lack of communication between teams:
Customer satisfaction is often viewed as a responsibility of the support department. However, in reality that is not exactly true – good customer service is everyone’s job in an organization. Therefore, the different teams in an organization should communicate with one another constantly to know what customers want. For instance, the product development team must consult the support team to learn what service or product enhancements that the customers had trouble with and needed enhanced, and the support team should be able to guide customers to adapt to new changes easily.
Vtiger allows marketing, sales, support, and project management teams collaborate seamlessly within the CRM. With the direct messaging feature, support reps can reach out to any internal or external team member. And as these messages show up as real time notifications at the receiver’s end, the support rep is likely to get instant replies which in turn will speed up the support process.
