A poor customer service experience can travel faster than light (word of mouth, remember?) amongst your customers and your competitors. It can quickly eat up your good work and hard-earned customer relationships.
In this article, we’ll elaborate on 7 bad customer service habits and mistakes that you need to end right away. We’ll also go an extra mile for you and list down specific solutions to fix those bad client service habits.
Table of Content
7 Customer Mistakes You Are Making
Customer service is the lifeblood of a company. But over time the support team gets used to things and your customer service reps might develop some bad customer service habits and challenges.
These bad habits may result in more customer complaints, high customer churn, and a severe drop in customer experiences. Here are some of those mistakes that you can analyze and fix:
Being Unavailable
If you want to damage customer expectations and annoy your customer, it’s easy – be unavailable.
Imagine being a customer, struck with a product, and trying to set it up. You call the customer service and there is no answer, you mail them and still no reply. As a customer, you will end up frustrated.
At the very least, this will lead to a bad customer experience but what will usually happen is that you’ll ditch that company’s service and move on to a competitor’s solution.
How to Fix It?
A devoted team of customer support is all you need to eradicate this bad customer service habit. These customer service reps must attend to every customer query brought up via mail, messages, or call.
Have a great, updated website. Also make sure to have a dedicated FAQ, tutorial web page for all of your products and services. So that you do not have to attend calls for repetitive queries, and customers can refer to those FAQ pages and get the best form of help – serf-service.
CloudTutorial can seamlessly help you create the most interactive FAQ pages for your website.
Want to Keep a Record of Customer Feedback?
CloudTutorial helps you create a KB where you can store and share customers’ queries and feedback and refer them while updating your processes!
Not Taking Customer Feedback Seriously
Feedback is related to the issues that your product or service might have and is, thus, your best chance at improving your solution.
Honest critical feedback is a goldmine for so many businesses.
But customer service teams often tend to ignore or miss out on customer feedback.
Customer service bad habits include collecting the feedback but never passing it to the team that can implement the changes.
How to Fix It?
Constantly seek feedback on your products or services from the customers.
This will help you gain insights on customer thinking, customer needs – what your customer base is looking for, and what your ideal product or service should look like. It is also one of the easiest methods to get a list of pointers that can be improved in your product, straight from the people who are using it.
Hence, consider every customer feedback and ensure that the required team takes the necessary steps to rectify the issue and make any customer smile.
Not Calling Them Back
Expectations are not just part of our personal lives, but also professional life. It often happens that a customer is promised to get a call back within a definite time, but they never get any callback. A customer feels extremely annoyed when he or she has to call customer service to get updates about his or her complaint, you get it?
How to Fix it
You have to make sure you call your customers back within the stipulated time frame.
To be at their service is an important virtue even (and especially) after the sale.
Looking for a better and easier solution to repair this bad customer service habit? Companies need to offer self-service features to present and new customers so that they aren’t dependent on calls from companies for updates. CloudTutorial helps you create comprehensive FAQ pages where your loyal customers can find answers to all their questions, queries, and concerns. Cannot get simpler!
Pushing Your Customer in a Loop
When someone calls for support, the person is expecting to get the problem solved. He/she is not looking forward to getting a call transferred between 4554546 customer service executives.
Think of it from a customer’s perspective. You require some help and the people who are supposed to be helping you are transferring your call from one person to another. You are not getting any ‘help’. This way, their time is drained and they carry an awful customer experience.
How to Fix It?
Putting your customer in a loop is the last thing you should do. If you are not quite sure about the solution, be honest and tell your customer that you will call back at the earliest with some fix for their problem. Do not put them in an endless rut, rather answer their queries as quickly as you can and retain meaningful relationships.
This is also where a knowledge base can serve as a great resource. When someone faces an issue, instead of shuffling between 65445 call transfers, all he/she can do is – go to your knowledge base, land on the specific concern he/she has, and find instant answers.
However, for that to happen, your company must have a knowledge base in the first place. And that’s exactly what CloudTutorial helps you achieve – a comprehensive knowledge base (a hub of answers to all questions, queries, and concerns) that your customers might have.
Getting Defensive or too Professional
Let’s say what Joey is complaining about is a bit unreasonable and you can’t do anything about it. So you immediately start getting defensive. Now every time he is sharing his issue, you are throwing off company policies on him and rudely stating how the resolution is impossible.
Do you think you are winning here?
No. You’re not only losing Joey here but also 45234 others who follow him on Instagram. All these people will support him when he posts his concerns and fires up conversations about his customer experience with your company.
How to Fix it
Respect your customer’s emotions and take steps to evade this bad customer service habit. A customer’s call to customer service must be like a therapy session. The customer service team must never reject customers’ issues even if something is not possible or unreasonable.
Make your loyal customers believe that you would have helped them if you could. Share with them the practical and logical reasons why something can’t be done. Don’t forget to be polite and patient. Even if their problem is not resolved, customers will always remember your attitude.
Set up an FAQ Page in Minutes!
CloudTutorial facilitates you to create FAQ pages that answer most of the customers’ queries instantly!
Hidden Charges
You go to a site, see products on sale, select some of the products, complete all the steps, but when you go to the checkout, boom! You see the additional charges pop up all of a sudden and the “discounted product” is no more affordable. Who would want to go back to such sites that keep hidden charges?
How to Fix It?
Be extremely transparent about the rates. No one likes to be bombarded with hidden charges after they have spent 80 minutes curating the shopping cart. Make the prices and all the additional charges crystal clear to the customers from the very beginning.
We have said this earlier and we will say this again – having an FAQ page on your business website will solve most of these concerns. Businesses can enlist specific questions related to additional charges so that your loyal customer base does not receive a surprise (more of a shock) at the end. CloudTutorial for the win again!
Taking the Calls Without Any Zeal
Recently when Mahira called the customer support team to complain about her set-top box, the executive seemed to be in a hurry to hang up. He blandly answered everything. He solved the query but it was a rough experience for Mahira.
When customers call/raise support tickets for the same queries 545646 times in a day, your staff member or customer service reps are bound to sound dull and unimpressive – not their mistake. It’s hard for customer support agents to maintain enthusiasm when they are saying the same thing over and over again – each day.
But this bad customer service habits hurts the customer experience who are expecting personalized and exciting attention.
How to Fix it?
The best way out of this rut is to have a system so that your customers do not have to call you for trivial queries.
Tools like Chatbots are an excellent way to guide your customers through repetitive queries.
But an even better way of enhancing user experience is a hub of frequently asked questions. So that customers can browse through common queries and even gain in-depth answers – if needed.
CloudTutorial helps you build just that. Once you have a FAQ page on your website, you’ll see a sharp drop in the number of customer support calls – essentially the ones that call for repetitive queries. This helps you serve your customers better as you can now cater to customers who have more pressing and unique concerns.
FAQs
Conclusion
Great customer service is what differentiates just another brand from a brand that enjoys customer loyalty and has a lower customer churn rate. Does your business have any of these bad customer service habits? If it has, it’s high time you fix them with the help of the mentioned solutions.
The best way for businesses is to offer a self-service FAQ page or knowledge base that would help your customers resolve their queries on their own without having to interact with any support executive. Sign up for FREE into the ever-reliable CloudTutorial and create your own easy-to-understand knowledge base in minutes!
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