Two Customer Service Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make
Posted by aonenetworks On September 14, 2012
Customer service takes the brunt of complaints, pressures, and sacrifice in most businesses. Not only do they have to control costs, they often have to make customers happy, uphold policy, bring customers in, and smile the entire time they’re doing it. Because of the massive amount of responsibility that the department faces every day, excelling in one area of their jobs often makes another part suffer. Sometimes they’re on goal with their sales numbers but have suffering customer satisfaction ratings. Once you’re aware that these things can happen, you can begin to take steps against them happening in the first place. Here are a few examples.
Having a Boxed Response and Solution
So if A always happens, and B always solves it, then the customer is always satisfied and you can move onto the next call, right? Unfortunately, this is not always true. People are individualized and so are the situations they present to customer service agents. Emotions come into play and how someone is feeling should influence how a customer service agent responds to the situation. Guidance scripts are nice, but trying to nail down everything someone should say to an irate customer is just about as effective is reading your speech off a piece of paper in front of an audience. Make sure your agents are armed and ready for all situations, but don’t force them to say specific things. Give them enough power to adapt and flex depending on the circumstances.
Trying to Put too Much Information into a Single Service Call
Upselling is an important thing to keep in mind, especially if your customer is happy and likes what your company is doing. If a client calls and your customer service agent has the perfect service that will help them, then there’s absolutely no shame in offering that service. This makes any service offered a win-win situation; you make some extra money, and your client gets better quality service. However, if your customer has just had a bad experience, is obviously in a hurry, or doesn’t want anything extra (and has expressed such), upselling can completely destroy any relationship your company had with that particular customer. In addition, offering four or five additional services can also irritate and frustrate customers, especially when those services can’t help them. Make sure everyone is keeping their service calls to the point, easy to understand, and customized to the client’s needs.
