“ A happy customer might tell a friend, but an unhappy one will tell the world.”
As a business, you might be well aware of all the benefits a positive customer support experience brings. But are you also aware of what a bad customer service experience does to your business?
It brings down your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), reduces retention rate, steals all your loyal customers, and leaves you with a drop in revenue and a bleak future. However, by identifying where your customer service is failing and taking quick action, you can avoid this eventuality.
Let’s take a deeper dive to understand how you can make it right.
What is bad customer service?
Bad customer service can simply be described as when a company or business does not meet customer expectations with respect to their response time, quality of service/products and overall customer experience.
It’s the year 2021 and it is becoming very evident that customers are willing to spend more for a great customer experience. A bad customer service experience not only harms your relationship with your customers but also affects your brand reputation.
As customer contact channels continue to increase, it is critical to engage with customers effectively. Most companies these days are daunted by the challenge of effective customer engagement and improved customer experience to grow their business. While it is always better to be prepared and avoid bad customer service, you should also have a service recovery strategy to tackle the issue when things get out of hand.
What contributes to poor customer service and how to avoid it
Studies have shown that US companies lose over $75 billion to bad customer service. Here are the most common reasons that contribute to your customers’ bad customer service experience and tips on how to avoid it.
1. Lack of real-time support
Customers want immediate responses to their queries. They hate waiting and don’t like to be put on hold for long. Studies have also shown that 90% of customers claim that immediate response is significant when responding to a customer service question.
There is also an increasing demand for customer support to be made available 24/7. Failing to offer these to your customers indicates that you don’t pay attention to your customer needs, and this can easily turn out to be a bad support experience. Especially in industries such as travel and banking, the ability to reach out for support is critical to building trust and loyalty from customers.
How to avoid this?
- Switching to live chat support will help you offer real-time support to your customers. With chat support, agents can simultaneously handle 2-3 chat conversations, and this helps bring down your first response time.
- Chatbots are the best option to offer 24×7 support. They can handle all your routine and common queries and let your customer service agents focus on complex issues.
- Integrating your live chat software with chatbots will perform wonders for your business. It will boost customer satisfaction and build customer loyalty.
How Shuttle Delivery tackled this
Shuttle Delivery, a South-Korean online food delivery service, was able to bring down their resolution time by 80% without hiring any new agents. Initially, they faced major hurdles with phone support as agents would be caught on phone calls for long. But after switching to chat support, they were able to offer immediate support and deliver a better customer experience.
2. Failure to offer unified support to customers
Each customer is different, and each prefers a different channel to reach your support teams. Be it phone, chat, email, or social media; you should have a unified support strategy in place. Offering support via different channels will make it convenient for the customers to reach out on their preferred platform. However, without an omnichannel support platform, your customer data might be hard to find, might get displaced, or worse, and you could lose your customers to your competitors.
How to avoid this?
- Invest in a good omnichannel support software, which will help you manage your support tickets coming from different channels in a single unified interface.
- Choose a support software that makes all your third-party integrations easily manageable so you can get context in a single place.
- Live chat has now evolved and customer support is now available on messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat and more. Choose a live chat tool that lets you offer seamless support right into your customer’s preferred messaging channel.
How Instantprint tackled this –
Instant Print, UK’s largest online printer, increased its CSAT score to 98% with Freshchat. They integrated the live chat software with messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, making it convenient for their customers to reach out.
Also, with the Arrangr integration with Freshchat, they were able to schedule video meetings without any limitations easily. With Freshdesk omnichannel, they unified all their customer conversations into a single interface irrespective of the source channel.
Instant Print Facebook Support
3. Poor training of customer support agents
Your customer service agents are the frontline reps who are in direct contact with the customers and their attitude towards your customers can make or break your business. Your customer service reps must have the right etiquette training and customer service skills to handle all types of customers.
Empathy in support is what differentiates an IVR or chatbots from a human agent. When basic expectations aren’t met during interactions – for instance, an agent not maintaining their professionalism, not taking a second to greet a customer at the beginning of a conversation, or simply not being polite can lead to a bad customer service experience.
How to avoid this?
- Educate agents on the importance of maintaining professionalism and following the right customer service etiquettes right from their onboarding. When they know that empathy is a core element of your service strategy from the very beginning, they will deliver delightful experiences from Day 1. Also, shadowing senior members and role-play exercises will help them handle different customers with grace.
- Offering periodic retraining sessions at proper intervals will help agents improve their skills and deliver positive experiences to your customers.
- Offer the right tools and resources to help them offer a better support experience to the customers. If your agents aren’t familiar with any tool or software, train them to help navigate better.
- Keep track of your metrics and monitor support teams’ and individual performance. This will help you identify your areas of improvement.
4. Transferring calls to multiple agents
No customers like being transferred from one agent to another. But what’s more frustrating is having to repeat the issues over and over each time you get connected. These are examples of bad customer service.
Being transferred to different agents increases your average resolution time and makes your customers feel that their time is wasted and not valued. This will leave your customers unsatisfied and they would also abandon the conversation midway.
Source
How to avoid this?
- Invest in a good support software that will assign the support tickets to the right agent. With the right assignment rules, you can automatically assign conversations to the right agent based on their skills, expertise and agent load.
- Integrating your support tool with CRM software will offer all historical customer data on a single interface. This will give everyone looped into customer interaction, the complete context on the issue and save customers from repeating their issues or any information.
How Klarna tackled this
Klarna, a Swedish fintech company, was easily able to handle 1 million conversations every day at ease. Freshchat’s IntelliAssign helped them auto-route support conversations to the right agent based on their load and skill set. Also, by integration with CRM, their agents were able to access complete context to have an informed support conversation.
5. Not acting on customer feedback
How will you know if your customers are experiencing good or bad customer service? The only way to understand the pulse of your customers is by collecting feedback. But your job doesn’t end with collecting just the feedback, you still need to act on the given feedback.
Customer feedback is extremely significant for the growth of your business. Furthermore, your unhappy customers’ feedback is an excellent learning source for you and your teams to work on and improve.
How to collect feedback?
- You can collect feedback in multiple ways – via email, in-store, via in-app conversations or phone calls or surveys.
- You can collect customer feedback right after you close a support conversation with the customers or as they are about to leave your store/website or at periodic intervals based on the product or service.
- You can also collect feedback on products after getting them delivered or a few days after their purchase in the store. You can do this by simply sending out an email and asking them to rate the products/service.
- Collect feedback regularly and pass it on to the respective teams to improve your service/ products to the customers. You might also receive negative feedback, but ensure that you respond and assure that it won’t happen again.
6. Not keeping track of your metrics
Not measuring your customer support will have a negative impact on your business. Keeping track of your metrics is crucial for business. If you don’t, you will not get in-depth insights into your business, nor will you be able to identify the gap between what your business delivers vs. what your customers expect. Measuring your customer service metrics will help you understand your customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention rate, and team productivity.
How to fix it?
- Define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and monitor your performance on a daily, weekly, or quarterly basis. Some of the important metrics to track include –
– Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT),
– First Response Rate(FCR),
– Net Promoter Score (NPS),
– Customer Retention Rate (CRR) and
– Average Resolution time
- Investing in the right support tool should provide you with easy access to periodic reports and in-depth analytics.
How Wadi Degla SC tackled this
Wadi Degla Sc, a sporting club, had issues with measuring KPIs on agent productivity with Intercom. But after switching to Freshchat, they were able to look into fine details on agent productivity with its varied range of reporting.
“I like Freshchat’s reporting. Right from the conversation overview, team and agent performance, customer satisfaction, agent availability, and so on. It gives you a more 360-degree insight on how my team is working. It’s more detailed than Intercom.”
Amr Onsy
Director of Customer Service
Wadi Degla SC
7. Lack of right support tools
Investing in the right tool for your support plays a crucial role in your overall customer support experience. Most to all of the issues mentioned above would be solved right away with the right tool. The right support tool will not only be beneficial for your business but will also help improve agent productivity and deliver good customer service.
How to choose the right one?
- Investing in the right helpdesk software will help you offer seamless omnichannel support, ease agent burden, and monitor performance in a single solution.
- Good live chat software will bring down your support costs and help you deliver personalized customer service in real-time. Powered with automation, they can boost agent productivity and help you resolve a higher volume of support queries in a limited time.
- A good AI-powered chatbot is a boon to your business. This will help you offer support outside business hours and automate all routine queries. With context-driven answers and seamless agent transfer, these chatbots can deliver the right response without making customers feel trapped in an automated response system.
- The right support software should offer the right tools to build self-service resources for your customers. This will reduce the number of incoming queries by enabling customers to solve common queries on their own.
How the right customer engagement strategy can help avoid bad customer service experiences
We’ve put together a list of best practices to ace customer engagement based on the various stages of a user’s journey — some ideas you can use to align with your service strategy and get you off the ground.
Customer engagement for onboarding
The first important phase for customer engagement post-purchase is when the customer signs up to use your product or service for the first time. Your engagement strategies at this point decide the journey of the customer with your product. At this stage, you need to start showing your customers that you care, so stating the obvious – empathy is key.
Create a strong impression: Your users are looking for reasons to continue engaging with you. They are using your product to solve problems or achieve goals. You need to be able to help them accomplish this. Send out emails with guidelines and best practices based on specific use cases they might need to use your product. Give them a chance to take a tour of your product and ask them for feedback. Send them in-app messages to proactively engage with them and keep them informed of updates.
Provide help in every way possible: One of the most important ways to engage with your customers is by providing an omnichannel engagement experience. Your support should be reliable and accessible through your customer’s preferred channel, be it messaging, call, or email. For customers who do not prefer such interactions, keep them engaged through in-product FAQs, which lets them explore the product independently.
Create a habit among users: Every kick-ass brand out there, like Google, Facebook, and Slack, are doing great for a reason — they create a habit among their users. Try to help your users build a habit of using your product. The only way to do this is to be consistent and persuasive with respect to the content that you post.
Customer engagement for retention
Customer retention is a true representation of how successful your company is in terms of satisfying your customers. Retention can be twice as powerful as new acquisitions in terms of profitability. And guess what? Customer engagement is the direct quantification for retention.
Obtain feedback and act on it: As mentioned earlier, Be on the lookout for feedback and testimonials from your customers. Act on feedback, answer queries and offer shoutouts to good testimonials on social media. At this phase, your respondents have specific expectations and they want to be heard out at all times. Ensure that you employ channels like live chat that enable instant and proactive customer support. Reach out to your customers whenever you receive a bad customer service score to understand what’s missing.
Encourage and reward customer advocacy: Most businesses take loyal customers for granted. Avoid this. Reach out to customers who have given you a good rating. They are your potential advocates and boost word of mouth advertising. Collaborate with them and encourage them to talk about your product to their friends’ circle and followers. Build a community and share newsletters, guidelines and videos regularly to keep them engaged. Every time there is a product update, include them in the testing phase.
Deploy a customer success/ relationship management team: Especially when it comes to high-value clients, deploying a dedicated customer success team where individual relationship or account managers are mapped to a certain number of clients has been proven to improve customer retention. A customer success team is usually tasked with maintaining a high-touch, personalized relationship with their customers, in order to build long-term loyalty and business dependence.
Final thoughts
The bottom line is, if you’re really in for the long haul, steer clear from committing bad customer service. So yes, customer engagement is vital. Bad customer service can cost you a lot of money, your business reputation, and a lifetime worth of damage. If you do not take good care of the different phases of the user journey and engage with your customers efficiently, it might cost you more than just your revenue. Try Freshchat to offer a consistent support experience and delight your customers.
