Business Killer: Paying A Big Price For Inadequate Customer Support
It’s vital your company is getting its customer service right. Impeccable customer service can outweigh poor marketing, but exceptional marketing will struggle to replace poor customer service.
So, what is “good customer service?”
This is often open to interpretation, but, on the whole, long response or wait times, lack of knowledge within the customer service team, impersonal interactions and poor attention to detail are huge customer service no-nos. Companies who are guilty of this often find themselves facing negative results, and these can be difficult to overcome. In fact, a recent study demonstrated that poor customer service is costing businesses $62 billion per year. Since 2013, this figure has risen by a whopping $20 billion.
This demonstrates the true cost of bad customer service. However, thankfully, there’s still time to turn it all around. Here are some of the negative impacts bad customer service can have on your company, and how you can make sure you’re avoiding them:
Damaging Your Reputation
The reputation of your brand is priceless, and won’t be something you can afford to let slip. However, in today’s increasingly connected world, when customers feel they’ve received a bad experience, they’re quick to soil a company’s reputation on the Internet. Following a bad experience, they’re quick to write negative reviews online, and may even go as far as venting their frustrations on social media. This means the entire world can see what a terrible experience they’ve had.
This can have an impact on your sales, but it can also decrease that valuable marketing tool – word of mouth. To repair the damage of negative reviews, you need to accept responsibility for what’s happened, making it clear you’re taking all the right steps to resolve the issue the customer has had. After you have publicly declared this, try to start resolving the issue privately. There’s nothing worse than an ongoing battle that’s visible for everyone to see on Facebook. You should also address the negative feedback within your team too. Find out why the incident occurred, how you could have done things differently and what your customer service team can learn from it.
Converting Leads Becomes Difficult
Your conversions can take a hit when customers receive bad customer service. And even though customer service tends to focus on current customers, it can also impact prospective clients too. Consider how many times you’ve tried to contact a company and you haven’t heard back. It’s frustrating, isn’t it?
Therefore, it’s important you have employed the right strategies and an elite piece of help desk software, like that from sysaid.com, within your company. This will allow you to stay on top of your leads by utilizing a ticketing system. This way, none of your leads will be missed, and your customer service team will have everything they need to deal with customer inquiries quickly and efficiently.
Employees Start To Leave
It isn’t just your business’s sales and image that can be impacted by inadequate customer service, as your employees can be affected as well. If your customer service team is struggling, it’ll be your best customer service agents who have to pick up other people’s issues. This can quickly lead to dissatisfaction among your employees, and even burnout. Equally, if your company is constantly being slated, your best employees may jump ship in fear the business isn’t going anywhere.
To make sure you keep staff members, ensure that those employees who are exceeding are rewarded, and that those who are under performing are assessed on a frequent basis. Create a great company culture that people want to work hard for. It’s easy to slip into an “average” mentality, where agents provide customer service that’s OK. But if you’re constantly pushing and rewarding employees to offer exceptional customer service, this raises the bar for everyone and will produce above average employees.
Customer Lifetime Values Start To Drop
It’s more expensive for you to find new customers than it is to keep existing ones, which is why customer service is paramount to your business’s success. One study even found that 54% of customers would be willing to pay more money for great customer service from the brands they like shopping with. This just emphasizes how important your average customer lifetime value is.
If you find this is starting to drop, you can use inbound marketing techniques to improve it. Methods include producing newsletters, FAQ pages, how to articles and videos, and webinars. In all of these cases, the best way to resolve bad customer service in your company is to avoid it all together, but the second best thing you can do if you notice it declining is to correct it before it gets worse.
