We’ve all experienced poor customer service. The issue can be small like waiting in a long queue or bigger such as receiving a completely different service than expected. Whatever the case negative experiences leave us deeply unsatisfied and hesitant to use the same service again in the future. Keep reading to learn more about poor customer service and its negative consequences!
Poor Customer Service: Meaning
Poor customer service happens when customers receive an unpleasant, inadequate, or incorrect service from a business. This can result in dissatisfaction and put them off using the same service ever again. Appalling services also lead to negative reviews that might destroy the business’s reputation.
Poor customer service refers to inadequate service that leads to customer dissatisfaction.
Common issues facing businesses with a ‘bad service’ image include the difficulty in attracting new customers, loss of revenues, or additional costs if customers request refunds.
Example of poor customer service
To illustrate poor customer service and its consequences, let’s consider an example in a restaurant:
A restaurant fails to manage its bookings properly, which results in double bookings and incorrect timing of table availability. This causes customers to wait longer than expected. Instead of reassuring the waiting customers, the staff are unhelpful and inattentive. To add to the problem, the restaurant has trouble replenishing goods in time, leaving some customers waiting for nearly two hours without getting served before leaving.
Unsurprisingly, the restaurant receives a lot of complaints. Some customers left reviews that they would never return back to the restaurant and advised future diners not to go there. In time, it becomes harder for the business to attract new customers and now it is on the verge of closing down.
As you can see in the example above, poor customer service destroys the business’s public image and results in business failures. The sad thing is that all these problems could have been avoided if the business has invested more in training its employees.
Causes of poor customer service
The causes of poor customers service can be internal or external. Here are the four most common ones:
Poor Customer Service: Businesses make too many promises
A business making too many promises can lead to high expectations among customers, meaning if the business is unable to deliver those promises, customers will be disappointed. As an example, if a business promises next-day delivery if customers order before 6pm, but cannot keep up with it consistently, consumers may be disappointed. To avoid poor customer service, companies should not make promises they cannot keep or invest more resources to ensure the promises are kept.
Poor Customer Service: Ineffective resource management
Even if a business has the resources to attain its promises, but is unable to manage its resources properly, it may not meet customers’ expectations and cause customer dissatisfaction. For example, even if there is enough staff on a shift in a busy restaurant, if they are not managed properly or allocated to do the right duties it may cause customer disappointment, perhaps due to the slow service and unclean tables, among many others.
Poor Customer Service: External influences
Bad customer service can occur due to external influences. For example, if certain passengers are travelling with small children in an airplane, and they are loud, it can result in an unpleasant experience for passengers that are sitting nearby. It’s not under the business’s control, however, businesses could avoid this by making a seating plan dedicated to families with small children if they have enough resources.
Poor Customer Service: Insufficient communication
Businesses can disappoint customers if they do not communicate transparently with them. As an example, if a concert starts 30 minutes late and this is not communicated to the customers in advance, it can lead to customer disappointment. On the other hand, if the company has informed consumers in advance, it may not have caused as much disappointment as consumers will probably have expected the delay and may have arrived at the venue later.
Figure 1. Causes of poor customer services, StudySmarter
Consequences of poor customer service
Poor customer service can lead to various consequences, from customers not returning to the business to a damaged reputation due to bad reviews. Let’s have a look at some of them:
Customer dissatisfaction
If customers are dissatisfied with the business service, they may not return to buy from the business in the future. This can cause a loss of sales and incur more costs for acquiring new customers. The cost of new customer acquisition can be five times as expensive as retaining existing ones.1
Dissatisfied customers may also talk about their negative experiences to their family and friends or leave a review online. This leads to the next consequence which is the difficulty of attracting new customers.
The difficulty of attracting new customers
To grow, a business needs to expand its market and attract new customers. However, this may prove difficult if the company gets a bad name due to its horrendous customer experience. Without new customers, businesses are likely to fail because they can’t make sufficient income to cover day-to-day expenses.
Poor Customer Service: Incurring additional costs
Another way for a business to grow is to retain existing customers. However, this is much harder to do if customers undergo such a horrendous service that they never want to experience it again. To gain back customers’ trust, the company will need to pour a lot of money into repairing its reputation.
In cases where the business provides wrong information or sells customers incorrect or damaged objects, it also has to do a refund on customer requests. This incurs more costs for the company.
Poor Customer Service: Losing revenue
Overall, bad customer service can lead to businesses losing their revenue. Without enough income to sustain itself, the business will face the risk of closure.
Poor Customer Service: Poor reputation via word of mouth
Another negative outcome of bad customer service is poor reputation due to negative word of mouth.
Word of mouth is one of the most trusted forms of communication in business. It outperforms many popular marketing channels including TV commercials, print ads, and social media.2 People are more likely to purchase items recommended by friends and family or ones that have positive reviews on the Internet.
Word of mouth (WOM) is a form of spoken communication where people share information about your business. It is basically free advertising by customers who are satisfied with your products or services.
Negative experiences, however, can lead to bad word-of-mouth that destroys the company’s reputation. This is because people often exhibit ‘a negativity bias‘ — the tendency to remember unpleasant experiences vividly and gossip about them. In fact, according to research, if your business receives one negative review, it will take up to 40 positive customer experiences to undo it.2
Figure 2. Consequences of poor customer service, StudySmarter
Signs of poor customer service
In this section, we shall look at the signs of poor customer service. Here are three tell-tale signs customers may get a bad experience at a business:
Poor Customer Service: Inflexibility in regards to appointment times
Today people are living busy lives. They have jobs, families and many other personal commitments to attend to. Businesses that offer only a few appointment times per day can cause inconvenience to the customers and result in an overall negative experience. For example, if someone needs to get a COVID-19 test for their travel but there are only a few time slots in a nearby test centre, it can create a nuisance as they have to travel further away to get tested.
Poor Customer Service: Unfriendly welcome
The first thing a customer should experience when encountering a business is a friendly welcome. Suppose a customer enters a hotel that they have booked without being greeted or being smiled at, this is a sure sign of poor customer service. The unfriendly welcome can make customers feel offended and thus they may not return to the hotel. Rather than ignoring guests, the hotel receptionists should smile, greet them warmly and ask how they can help.
Poor Customer Service: Long wait times
Businesses that let customers wait a long time before getting assistance are bound to offer a bad service as well. When customers hold on to the phone or wait in-store for too long they can get frustrated and hang up or leave before using the service. This results in a loss of sales and negative word-of-mouth. To reduce customer wait times, the business should ensure sufficient staff and hire temporary workers during peak hours.
Overall, we can see that the causes of poor customer service can be both internal and external. Whatever the cause, poor customer service tends to cause a negative experience and result in people not using the service again. In the long run, this can lead to business failure. To stay in the market for a long time, it’s important for companies to recognise signs of poor customer service and address them before it’s too late.
Poor Customer Service — Key takeaways
- Poor customer service refers to inadequate service that leads to customer dissatisfaction.
- Poor customers service can be caused by businesses making too many promises, inefficient resource management, external influences, and insufficient communication.
- The key consequences caused by poor customer service are customer dissatisfaction, difficulty to attract new customers, incurring additional costs, and losing revenue.
- The three common signs of poor customer service include inflexibility in regard to appointment times, unfriendly welcome, and long wait times.
SOURCES
1. Taylor Landis, «Customer Retention Marketing vs. Customer Acquisition Marketing», outboundengine.com, 2021.
2. Jon Tan, «Why Word-Of-Mouth Is The BEST Marketing Tool You Have», referralcandy.com, 2015.
3. Andrew Thomas, «The Secret Ratio That Proves Why Customer Reviews Are So Important», Inc.com, 2022.
Maybe the best way to begin to describe excellent customer service is to talk about what it isn’t. It certainly isn’t a department or a job title. It’s the opposite of this title, “The Lousy Customer Service We Receive Every Day.”
Excellent customer service is seriously lacking most places we spend our money. Think about it, can you recall a recent experience where the customer service was really bad? Sure you can. Think of other places you have spent your hard-earned paycheck: grocery store, bank, restaurant, a fast food chain, a department store, a gas station, a hotel, an airline, an online merchant and the list could go on. How many of these had poor to average service? Probably most of them. How many really stood out and had outstanding service? That’s part of the problem today, not many people or companies deliver excellent customer service. Most don’t seem to care about it, even though they say they do.
Why is customer service that poor? One reason is that the customers have become accustomed to poor service. Few companies stand out, mediocre service is rampant. Customers don’t necessarily demand more; they are numb to poor service. Walmart is a key example. They are consistently rated poor in all categories but have one of the biggest companies in the world. Second, many companies treat employees as commodities, especially during challenging economic times. Companies have little loyalty to employees and employees have little loyalty to them and their customers. A third consideration is that many companies and people don’t really value delivering better service. They do just enough to get by. They don’t get very good service as customers so why give it to others?
How bad is it? The American Customer Satisfaction Institute at the Ross Business School at the University of Michigan rates some 240 companies across 34 industries on a monthly basis. These ratings are more about the customer service provided by employees than it is the quality of the product. The average rating is 76.5. If you were a professor grading papers that would be at best a C grade. The airline industry has a 67 average which is awful. Retail is rated 78 or a C average. Most companies are poor to average. That’s the state of the art in customer service. As far back as 1982 Tom Peters and Bob Waterman published a book called In Search of Excellence which talked about the importance of high quality service. Companies have spent billions to try to improve. Most of it made little impact.
What does poor service look like? Since you are a customer, too, you know the specifics. Here are the top ten for your review:
- Lack of manners
- Rude discourteous behavior
- Long waits on the phone
- Long waits in line
- Lack of knowledge of the product or policy
- Lack of follow-through
- Not resolving a complaint
- Unresponsive technology or not knowing how to use it
- Can’t get a hold of a real person
- Unfulfilled promises, lies and other deceptions
You could probably add a few items to the list. When you think about it, all of the above are inexcusable. If you delivered the above service to yourself as a customer, how would you feel? Now this is a crazy possibility. Wouldn’t you be disappointed, frustrated, confused, angry, upset, inconvenience, irritated or even outraged? Wouldn’t you complain? Wouldn’t you demand better treatment? Sure you would. As a customer service person, do you want to do that to a customer? Of course not! However, if you don’t care, you should change jobs and not work with the public. And, stop reading this article. It won’t really help you.
Not caring is a disease that has yet to be cured. Non-caring attitudes and approaches sicken everyone: customers and fellow co-workers alike. You can beat the top ten examples of poor service, and learn how to deliver excellent customer service. How? It begins with caring for your customers and doing the right thing for them. Then, you keep learning.
About the Author
Rick Conlow is CEO & Senior Partner of WCW Partners, a performance improvement company. Based in Minneapolis/ST. Paul, Minnesota, WCW work with clients in a variety of industries worldwide to help them excel in sales, service and leadership, facilitating business growth and vitality. Rick is author of Excellence in Management, Excellence in Supervision and Returning to Learning.
Customer service, the interaction between the client and the supplier is an integral part of the purchasing and user experience, and as such, is the key to continued success in business.
What are the reasons for poor customer service?
Top 10 Reasons for poor customer service and their solution
1. People are not trained. When an organization does not spend the time to fully train their people the consequence is poor service.
Solution: Dedicate resources (time and money) for training and reinforcement. Employees should be fully informed about company goals, the products and services. Emphasis and training should be focused upon the importance of listening and responding to the customer’s requests. People can only do the job if they are given the right tools and objectives. It costs money to train people. It will cost more if you decide not to train them.
2. People don’t care. Selecting the correct personality is crucial for your business success. Apathetic or self centered personality types have no place in a business that requires customer contact.
Solution: Focus the selection and evaluation process to identify personalities that do not fit the required profile. Get the wrong people out immediately, it also sends a clear message to everyone.
3. Sabotage. Angry or frustrated employees can actively work to sabotage and try to destroy the company.
Solution: Keep honest and open communications with employees. Informally and formally review performance, goals, objectives and feelings to stop potential problems before they reach the customers. Get these people out of the front lines immediately.
4. Employees don’t believe in the company, product or service. If the image, marketing and promotion of the company is quite different from the reality, workers will not be able to sustain a positive attitude in the face of problems they know exist.
Solution: Be honest. Work closely with customer service, marketing and quality control to identify real problems and fix them. Don’t let marketing advertise over problems, solve them.
5. Personal problems reflected in work. When an employee’s personal life is in crisis or out of control, they may exercise control, aggression and negativism toward customers in an attempt to put some part of their life in order.
Solution: Clear communications with employees: If their personal life is affecting work performance, talk about it. Time off, access to counseling or just listening may prevent more serious problems.
6. Burnt out. Too much negative, too many complaints can lower a person’s level of commitment and move their positive and helpful attitude to an apathetic one.
Solution: Constant communication helps to identify who is burning out and why. Get customer service people together to talk of success and how to deal with the frustrations. Provide recognition or incentives for excellence in dealing with problems.
7. Not providing the correct solutions to customers, lack of empowerment. There is nothing worse than dealing with an employee who listens to a problem, then shrugs and says they have to ask someone else in the company to intervene and provide a solution.
Solution: Give the people on the front lines the authority, power, tools and ability to solve problems.
8. Don’t see the benefits – don’t understand their role in the company.
Solution: Employees project an image of the company. They are the company. They should be reminded of their importance and value to the customer and to the company. Incentives, recognition, training and constant reinforcement are important.
9. Apathetic from hearing the same problems over and over. A fundamental role of the customer service division is to provide constant feedback on how customers view the company, the products and the service. If this feedback is not analyzed and acted upon by upper management a feeling of apathy and frustration is created.
Solution: Set up a model and procedure for the accumulation, analysis and implementation of solutions for the problems identified by customer service.
10. Incentives/salary not tied to results.
Solution: If you insist that the company depends upon people, and that people are the key to success, implement compensation packages, evaluations and incentives that support and reinforce this.
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Customer service experience is a vital cog for any business, but how vital is it?
HubSpot research says, “83% of companies that believe it’s important to make customers happy also experience growing revenue.
In such a hyper-competitive business era, it is important to know the consequences of bad customer service interaction and the benefits of an efficiently functioning customer support department.
Good customer service and business success are closely associated.
Understanding what is good customer service and knowing how it is closely associated with the overall business, help companies to build strong client relationships.
When businesses slide their service standards, they face negative consequences with serious repercussions on the overall business.
What is Bad Customer Service?
Bad customer service can be defined as when a business fails to meet customer expectations in terms of service quality, response time, or overall customer experience. The factors that have a negative effect on customer service are inefficient support staff, lack of real-time support, or unable to understand your customer needs.
An example of poor customer service not only worsens the existing customer relationships but also endangers the potential opportunities, and obviously erodes the bottom line of your business. Research by Microsoft states, “58% of consumers choose to switch companies because of poor customer service experience.”
Good customer service really speaks for itself. It is when you answer one of the top customer experience questions to deliver a higher level of satisfaction offered by the company. Some key attributes of good customer service are:
- Timely resolution of the problem
- Effective solution in the first contact
- Valuing customer’s time and feedback
- Good customer service etiquette
Bad customer service results in clients’ dissatisfaction and builds a negative customer experience. It might have adverse effects on business, such as decreased customer loyalty and higher customer churn. Some key elements of poor customer service are:
- Multiple touchpoints needed for resolution
- Provide wrong or inaccurate information
- Unreasonable payments and unexplained surcharges
- Overuse of scripts to respond to customers
How Does Poor Customer Service Affect your Business?
According to the report by WalkerInfo, customer experience will outshine price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2023. The customer experience (CX) continues to be a decisive factor for many customers. It is important for businesses to understand how a poor service experience would impact the overall brand.
Here are the implications of bad customer service:
- Increase churn rate – When you deliver a great experience, customers will return back to you and on the contrary, substandard service will encourage them to churn. A single instance of bad customer service is enough to switch to a new company.
- Affect brand loyalty – Customer loyalty is a strong predictor of a business’s long-term viability because loyal customers are durable. Poor customer service affects customer lifetime value (CLTV) as they leave you after a negative customer support experience. Loyalty and brand image are interrelated and losing loyal customers affects the overall brand.
- Higher customer service costs – Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. When customer service standards decline, the number of touchpoints increases which has a drastic impact on customer service costs.
Top Reasons for Bad Customer Service Examples (and How to Fix Them)
What are the reasons that may label businesses with the worst customer service tag? Let us go into detail and discuss the “how-tos” that businesses can practice in order to fix bad customer service experiences.
1. Fail to offer real-time support
Customers expect real-time responses. Hubspot research says, “90% of customers rate “immediate response” as very important when they have queries”. It means the response time of the channels you provide should be reasonable.
Businesses that focus on delivering 24×7 real-time support increase customer satisfaction that drives revenue and builds loyalty. Live chat and chatbots are the best communication channels when it comes to delivering real-time support.
With live chat, businesses can deliver real-time support to customers. It helps to initiate a proactive chat with website visitors & customers to provide the right guidance, stuck on a specific page on your website.
You can automate your conversations to deliver 24×7 engagement to customers when your support team is busy or not available. AI chatbots can answer FAQs promptly and improve customer satisfaction rates.
Bad customer service example
The customer experience example of Frontier Airlines shows the importance of CX. The famous airlines miserably failed to fulfill the two core elements of customer service i.e. compassion and communication. It shows that one instance of worst customer service failure can have serious consequences.
How to fix it?
- You can use live chat for offering real-time sales and support assistance to customers. It means more sales conversion and higher retention. It also improves customer satisfaction and cultivates loyalty.
- You can engage your customers 24×7 by chatbots. They are always available to answer simple queries, which reduces the number of support requests and improves team productivity.
- You can also combine both channels and deliver hybrid support to your customers. Use bots as the first point of contact to answer simple queries. The queries that need human support can be directed to live agents. You can witness improved customer satisfaction rates by giving customers the best of both worlds.
2. Fail to resolve in the first touchpoint
One of the principles of customer service is a faster solution in the first contact point. When the customer issue is identified in the first contact, not only is the resolution faster but the number of touchpoints is reduced.
For identifying the problems in the first contact visual engagement tools play a very important role. Gaining a visual understanding of the issue helps you to offer a concrete solution and improve customer satisfaction.
By using live engagement tools such as co-browsing and video chat, businesses can improve one of the key metrics i.e. average resolution time. These tools help your business to reverse from bad customer service to a good examples.
REVE Chat offers a complete toolkit of digital customer engagement tools such as co-browsing, and video chat. Sign up with REVE Chat and collaborate with customers in real-time and resolve their issues in first contact.
Key takeaways:
- With co-browsing, collaborate with your customers’ screen in real-time and know where exactly the customer is facing the issue and help to complete the complex process or form fill up much faster.
- Have direct conversations with video chat to help agents to understand the problem with clarity that further helps them to deliver the right solutions in the first contact itself. You can deliver technical support and deliver the best virtual in-person experience.
- With live engagement tools, deliver faster solutions with interactive and personalized communication. It has a significant increase in customer satisfaction levels.
- You can use live engagement tools to greatly increase your team productivity and deliver a good customer service experience.
3. Inefficient customer support team
A dedicated support team is a great pride for any business. Not having a competent team can create the worst customer service examples.
If your business is missing out on this factor, it might not be able to offer proactive support, therefore, losing loyal customers and deflecting brand reputation and more customer complaints. This brings out the vitality of roofing a knowledgeable and competent support team.
While hiring new support reps follow the below tips:
- Make the new hires aware of the importance of achieving a high level of customer experience.
- Maintain transparency as part of your customer service in the higher education training module. When you are transparent to your team in conveying the goals, they will put their best efforts into meeting customer service needs and expectations.
How to fix it?
- Regular training about products and etiquette should be for all employees. It should be consistent across all departments and teams.
- You can share all the important business information with the whole support team to make them aware of the issues and solutions.
4. Lack of customer service etiquette
Serve your customers with a pleasing smile. Does it really happen the way it is said?
It is crucial for the support team to have the right skills and etiquette to use powerful phrases for effective customer service. It reduces the negative impact of customer support and helps build great success stories.
Here are the key areas of customer service skills
Practice clear communication
You should convey to customers what you mean actually. Provide authentic information related to products and services to avoid future confusion among customers. Know your brand offers and discounts prior to offering to customers to maintain brand efficiency.
Understand customer psychology
Customers expect businesses should listen to their problems, value them and offer prompt solutions. Businesses that focus on understanding the psychology of customers provide a higher level of intuitive support and have better customer satisfaction.
Use positive scripts and phrases
You should design customer service scripts based on the scenarios where agents have to address customers. Positive chat transcripts and phrases can help to deliver faster responses and a consistent brand experience.
Set the right expectations
You should not be over-promising to your customers, especially about the things that you cannot fulfill. Saying ‘yes’ to everything that your customer demands leads to dissatisfied customers when you turn out. So, don’t make fake commitments and set customer expectations that will break their trust and loyalty.
Key takeaways:
- You should train your customer support team to be realistic and say yes to only the practical demands of customers. This leads to the right expectations and hence makes the customer experience better.
- Proper training over customer service skills and etiquette will build up a dedicated team that will improve your brand reputation and increases customer loyalty.
5. Not measuring your customer service
Measuring customer service quality is one of the vital aspects of every business. If ignored, it can have a terrible impact on your business. Companies that miss out on measuring customer service fail to gain the below benefits:
- Do not get insights into how your business is performing
- Unable to know your customers’ perception of your products & services
- Not able to identify the gaps between business and customers.
Thus, it negatively impacts your business in achieving complete success in team productivity, customer satisfaction, and retention.
This shows how critical it is to define customer service KPIs and measure them regularly.
The metrics are the performance measurement used by the support teams to monitor, analyze and take necessary actions to enhance customer service success.
Here are the key KPIs & metrics to measure customer service satisfaction
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – The CSAT score tells you how satisfied customers are with your business. You directly ask your customers to rate their satisfaction with your products and services.
- Average Response Time (ART): It measures the time between the customer initiating the chat and the agent responding to it. It is a very important KPI for customer service to consider for performance evaluation as it is one of the main customer complaints.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): FCR measures the efficiency of your customer support team to fix an issue on the first call. It indicates how capable your agents are in understanding and resolving the issue at the first touchpoint.
- A number of touchpoints – It measures the total number of returning interactions made by the customer to get the right solution for the same issue.
How to fix it?
- The higher the CSAT score the better is customer satisfaction. You can collect feedback in real-time like just after purchase, to know what is or is not working.
- In order to reduce your response time, you must either scale your support agents or use chatbots. Bots can handle the basic queries 24×7 when the agents are not available which reduces the number of support tickets.
6. Not taking customer feedback regularly
Have you been bothered to know whether your customers are happy with your service quality, products, or overall brand? If not you are missing out on a key element that results in setting poor customer service examples – i.e. Customer Feedback
As it said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Customer feedback is a vital ingredient for the success of every business.
How to fix it?
- Practice collecting customer feedback regularly. It will give a clear view of how your business is performing. You can identify the gaps between the customers and the business and end up with a product that is sheer perfection. It also opens up a conversation with customers and develops a long-lasting relationship.
- You can ask for feedback right after a customer service conversation, after a product demo, or after a successful transaction. In order to value customer feedback and make it effective you have to analyze and act upon it.
- Collect feedback from customers on a regular basis. Further, categorize it and share it with the respective departments to work on it.
- Make a plan of action by consolidating all the results. Train your support team to ask the right feedback questions at the right time via the right channels.
7. Not using the right tools
One of the important aspects of good customer service is using the right tools. The tools help in reducing the negative impact of support. When you equip your business with the right tools, it can benefit your business in the following ways:
- Helps to improve your team productivity
- Make better communication with customers
- Gain valuable insights about your customer journey
- Boost customer satisfaction
Some tools that you can use to deliver a better customer experience are:
Customer engagement tools – Give your agents an omnichannel engagement platform to know more about their journey and deliver consistent real-time service experience across all channels by using tools like live chat, co-browsing, and video chat.
Feedback tools – Use NPS or CSAT surveys to measure your customer satisfaction. The resulting score determines the level of satisfaction of your customers and highlights the areas that need improvement.
How to fix it?
- Identify your business needs and select the right tools to ensure a higher level of customer engagement and better customer satisfaction.
- Use your customer feedback to build improved products and services to match customer expectations. Also to make them feel an important part of your business.
Final Thoughts on Bad Customer Service
Bad customer service is detrimental to any business. However, if your business is customer-centric, delivering a better customer experience becomes the utmost objective for your organization. By becoming CX’s first brand, you not only eliminate the negative impact of customer service but also build lifelong customer relationships and brand loyalty.
REVE Chat provides an automated customer service platform that allows your business to deliver real-time sales/support assistance. Sign up today and empower your support team to deliver a great customer service experience.
Answer:
Poor customer service typically results in fewer customers, which translates into lower sales and profits for your business. This can initiate a vicious cycle in which a company tries to save money on staffing or customer service training, which makes service levels spiral downward even further.
Explanation:
pakitama kung mali
Poor customer service can not only impact the present/future sales standard but can negatively impact a business in a variety of ways. This is especially true for businesses that rely on repeat business and positive word-of-mouth advertising for its success. In addition to running the risk of alienating current customers with sub-standard service levels, chronically poor service can impact the business potential for attracting new customers as well.
If you come up with poor customer service, nothing’s going to save your business, no matter the quality of your product. Here we present 9 things you should avoid to serve your customers perfectly.
Businesses lose $2378 per second simply because they don’t understand that customer service should be the priority of each and every company.
They spend lots of money on advertising, but to what avail?
Remember, good customer service can work for you as a sales, marketing, and good-PR machine.
Customer service has an impact on a lot of different things, such as trust, loyalty, frequency of purchases, shopping cart value, etc.
When asking consumers what impacts their level of trust with a company, offering excellent customer service ranked number one. – Dimensional Research
Still think that customer service is bull?
Then you would like to know, that 3 in 4 customers switch brands because of poor customer experience.
And here is why…
Table of Contents:
- What Annoys Customers So They Switch Brands
- Side Effects Of Bad Customer Service
- The 9 Common Mistakes In Customer Service
- How To Make Good Customer Service Out Of Poor Customer Service
What Annoys Customers So They Switch Brands
Feeling unappreciated
48% of consumers expect specialized treatment for being a good customer. – Accenture
Unhelpful/rude staff
68% of customers believe the key to great customer service is a polite customer service representative. – AE
Being passed around to multiple agents
72% of consumers see having to explain their problem to multiple people as poor customer service. – Dimensional Research
Being kept on hold for too long
Consumers will wait on hold for an average of 11 minutes before hanging up.
Why is it important to know customers’ reasons for switching brands?
Simply because this knowledge is necessary to understand what annoys the customers and on that basis improve the situation in your company.
Side Effects Of Bad Customer Service
Bad Reputation
The average person tells 15 people when they’ve had a poor customer service experience. And what’s funny, is that men share their bad experiences with more people than women do.
On average men tell 21 people when they have had a poor customer service experience, while women tell 10 people. – AE
As you can see, people like sharing their opinion. The thing is, negative reviews and low ratings drive customers away.
At the same time, people take positive reviews and high ratings as social proof that a product or service is worth the purchase.
A couple of bad reviews and your reputation is ruined.
Loss of customers
51% of customers will never do business with the company again after just one negative experience.
In today’s business world the competition is huge. There are many almost identical companies offering the same thing.
It costs a customer nothing to chose your competitor if you let him down even once.
Loss of Employers
A company that offers poor customer service is a stone that pulls you to the bottom. It’s a sinking ship.
So the first thing your best employers will do is to jump this ship.
It will also affect the new employers. Does anyone want to work in a company with a bad reputation?
Loss of Potential Customers
We have already figured out that people like sharing their opinion. And fortunately or not, people also like learning others’ opinions.
Negative information makes people change their minds about purchasing the product or service.
A single negative review can cost the average business an average loss of 30 customers.
Come on, I’m pretty sure you know what do I mean.
Would you go to the restaurant if a friend of a friend of a friend once said that he spent the whole evening in the bathroom after eating there?
The 9 Common Mistakes in Customer Service
Now, when we know enough about poor customer service, let’s see how to make it better. What should we avoid to improve customer experiences?
1. Putting customers on hold for too long
People hate waiting, that’s why many customers are most frustrated by having to
wait on hold.
On average a customer will wait on hold 11 minutes before hanging up.
Imagine yourself waiting in a very long queue. The store has 9 cashiers, but for
some reason, only one is working. And when your turn comes, they ask you to wait. Wait!
It sounds like a horror movie script, I know…
When someone asks you to wait even more.
Try to avoid putting customers on hold, they hate it. But if you can not avoid it at all, explain why you need to put them on hold. Because what is even more frustrating than waiting on hold is ignorance of the cause of waiting on hold.
You can also propose a customer an alternative solution, such as calling him back at a time convenient for him.
2. Transfering caller again and again
There is nothing more unprofessional than transferring the caller again and again. That suggests that there is no specialist competent enough to solve the problem.
Besides, it just infuriates.
Would you like to stay longer with such a company?
I wonder…
3. Asking the customer to repeat
That simply means you are not listening. If you are not listening, you don’t care. If you don’t care, I don’t care either.
Thank you, next.
4. Leaving customers without a solution
Never leave a customer with anything. You must provide a solution for the customer to take home today, even though it wouldn’t be the solution he expected.
Offer an alternative solution. Even if it will be something small such as to sign him up for tomorrow or to show him how to reserve an appointment on the website.
It’s always something, you know…
5. Not being empathetic
Customer Empathy means walking a mile in the shoes of your customers. It means feeling their pain, understanding their needs, what really matters to them, what worries and aspirations they have.
That’s obvious, customers want someone empathetic to help them.
When you show deep empathy towards others, their defensive energy goes down and positive energy replaces it. That’s why being empathetic makes it easier for you to solve problems and deal with the customers.
6. Using negative language
Try to avoid saying negative words that may create a bad association with your
product or service.
For example, don’t use ‘problem’. Instead say ‘condition’, ‘issue’ or ‘situation’.
7. Ignoring customers’ feedback
52% of people around the globe believe that companies need to take action on feedback provided by their customers. – Microsoft
I think I don’t need to explain why it is stupid and has a bad impact on customer experiences. And still, most of the companies ignore customer’s feedback.
If your company is among them, better write on your forehead right away something like “Frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn about you and your opinion. We are not going to change anything. Scram! :)”.
8. Not being present on the channels of your customers
Customers see not being present on the channels of their choice as a bad customer service. It makes it hard to reach you, and there is nothing good at it.
The best way is to go omnichannel. As many channels you have as simple it is for the customer to reach you.
Learn more about different types of customer service here.
Being reactive, not proactive
68% of consumers say it increases their perception of a brand when companies send them proactive customer service notifications. – Microsoft
Don’t wait for the customers to get stuck with the product. Be the first one who reaches out to the customers to resolve their issue before it takes place.
Read more about Proactive Customer Service.
9. Being rude
Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1. – Stew Leonard
I know, working with people is difficult. Sometimes there is that strong desire to be rude to the customer.
Why not? They can…
No matter how strong is the desire, don’t do that!
Cause your customer is your boss. And even if you don’t like your boss, you can’t be rude to him. Otherwise, start looking for a new job.
How To Make Good Customer Service Out Of Poor Customer Service
Unfortunately, there is no standard way to fix all the problems. Each problem has its own solution and you are the one who decides what measures to take.
But there are 3 tips that will help you to get one step closer to the great customer service.
The first thing we need to do is to identify the problem areas. And KPIs can help us with that. So start measuring.
Measure
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- Response Time
As people hate waiting, it’s important to know how long it takes for a customer to reach you.
To calculate the Average Response Time, you need to divide the sum of all Response Times by the number of responses.
-
- First Contact Resolution (FCR)
It is a great way to determine how effective your service agents are at resolving issues quickly.
FCR = the total number of calls resolved correctly on the first attempt divided by the total number of first calls.
-
- Average Resolution Time (ART)
This is how much time on average does an agent need to solve a problem.
The time it takes to resolve issues is important to customers, as they like to get solutions quickly.
ART = Total time taken to resolve tickets divided by the number of tickets resolved in the selected period.
-
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
It’s also known as a Happy Customer KPI – the base and perhaps the most popular indicator.
Please rate the quality of the service you received today: poor, fair, good, great, excellent.
CSAT = (Number of satisfied customers (only great and excellent) / Number of survey responses) x 100 = % of satisfied customers
-
- Net Promoter Score
Its a measure of how likely your customers will recommend your brand. The customer chooses from 0 to 10, where 0 is never and 10 is very likely.
Based on the scores you categorize customers: promoters if 9-10, passives if 7-8, detractors of 0-6.
Positive scores indicate a business with good customer relations.
The goal of any business is development and growth. But as the customer base grows, the number of problem reports also grows.
Along with the increasing number of problem reports, it is becoming easier to forget/lose something. Moreover, wait times are getting longer what annoys customers.
For that reason, you need to arm yourself with helpful customer service tools that will support you in continuing growth.
Check out the best customer tools here.
Still wonder how customer service tools can help you?
That’s easy. Many customers get frustrated by transferring calls, this is one of the reasons they see your customer service as a poor one.
That’s obvious that no agent has all the knowledge required to answer every customers’ query.
That’s why, oftentimes, customers have to be redirected to the right department making you and them lose time.
Channels offers you IVR, with its help you can redirect every caller to the right department based on their needs, limiting the time you or your agents transfer the calls.
Start 7-day trial and try IVR for free
Customer Service Techniques
Businesses with the highest customer loyalty and satisfaction rates attach great importance to customer service techniques.
They put a lot of effort into employee training and constantly working on a single standard. And you must too.
Right customer service techniques will guarantee the company an intimate engagement with its customers.
Find all the most important customer service techniques, such as 5 Steps of Service, The rule of positive language, Failure Recovery or Empathy Techniques, here.
And don’t forget to implement them into the work of customer service.
Let’s wrap it up
Customer service is your main weapon. Not working on it, same as shooting itself in the knee.
Sorting out your problems and weaknesses is half the way. The other half is to arm yourself with the right customer service tools and techniques to never sin again.
Save yourself this infographic, it will remind you of the importance of customer service and motivate you to take action.
