Every business owner knows that customer service is the key to creating loyalty, increasing product awareness, and encouraging future purchases.
However, while everyone aims to create the perfect customer service experience, many businesses attempt to create this experience based off false assumptions and insufficient metrics. A customer service model based on outdated ideals only causes a business to miss out on opportunities to connect with their customer base.
Today, consumers want quality service without feeling like they’re being minimized. Consumers are becoming more savvy toward traditional approaches to customer service. With that in mind, here are some of today’s most popular customer service myths, as well as modern ways to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Louder complaints deserve more attention
While you should address persistently dissatisfied customers, you shouldn’t give a disproportionate amount of time to those who complain. In fact, most companies find that only five to ten percent of their customers are dissatisfied.
It’s tempting to focus on customers who seem persistently dissatisfied with the hope that your patience and attention will eventually win them over. This is known as the service recovery paradox, which states that a customer will think more highly of a company that resolved a problem than they would if the company provided non-faulty service to begin with. Ultimately, it’s important to remember that resolution of a single complaint isn’t as important as mending the process that caused the complaint to begin with.
If dissatisfied customers compromise more than ten percent of your total customer base, it’s time to shift your focus toward the performance issue behind their dissatisfaction. After you fix the core cause of customer dissatisfaction, complaints will resolve themselves.
Agents alone create customer experience
Although agents have a significant impact over customer experience, it can be difficult for them to fix already-low satisfaction levels. Instead of focusing on soft customer service skills, focus your time on addressing major performance failures, such as lack of knowledge and insufficient processes.
Devoting more attention to major performance issues will ultimately create a bigger overall impact on customer service experience. Each agent should be appropriately trained in your products and services and have confidence in their knowledge base and problem-solving abilities. Examining average agent response times will help you determine who needs additional training.
More time means a better experience
As a business owner, your time is valuable, so it can be easy to assume that you’re offering more value to problems that you choose to spend your time on. However, customers want fast, efficient solutions, and don’t want to be kept waiting for too long.
In order to determine how long your customers are kept waiting, develop a set metric for how long each type of call should take. Obviously, some calls naturally require more time than others, but you should still benchmark an appropriate investment of time for each type of issue.
Certain companies offer tools to increase workforce productivity and utilization when contacting lists of leads. A contact dialer, also known as a predictive dialer, automatically places outbound calls. Upon detecting a live answer, an agent is then connected. Contact dialers save you time and money by eliminating the need for manual dialing, waiting to leave messages, and unanswered calls. In addition, they’ll save your customers time by eliminating the wait to speak to an agent.
By focusing your attention on solving issues in your customer service model, you’ll achieve top-tier brand loyalty and growth as a business. It’s not necessary to settle for subpar satisfaction levels. Instead, aim to achieve high and sustainable numbers of highly satisfied customers that will make future purchases. All in all, shifting from outdated, traditional methods to enhance customer experience to modern methods will have a significant impact on your business.