When it comes to customer service, this is one of the most important parts of your company. How can you expect to succeed and make a large profit whenever your customers are unhappy with the assistance you are providing to them? If they can’t find the solution to their problems and you are not helping them out, how do you expect them to stick with you and continue to buy your products and services? And when it comes to finding success in the business world, a loyal customer base is one of the best things that you can develop.
Even with all of this in mind, many businesses still have some bad customer service habits that they continue to do. Whether this be not understanding the ROI of customer service or not using the latest technologies for your customers, we’re going to go through all of them down below. Keep reading to keep in mind the top habits that every business should avoid when it comes to customer service.
1. Using the Systems of Yesterday for Your Customers of Today
If you are a company of any size, you have got to have a CRM tool that helps you keep track of your customers and ensure everyone is happy. If you don’t know what CRM stands for, then chances are that you are one of those businesses who keeps track of customers on stray pieces of paper and old notebooks. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and there are plenty of online tools that allow you to keep track of your customers and your engagements with them. These tools are absolutely fantastic because you will be able to filter and search for each and every customer that you are dealing with and note various things about them. This is not only going to make your experience dealing with customers a whole lot easier but will ensure that every customer you have gets a personalized experience. And that’s really what they want, don’t they?
2. Not Understanding The ROI
One of the most difficult things to make clear to your bosses is the ROI of your customer service initiatives that you would like to start. Many people find it hard to see what kind of return they’re going to get on investing in something as broad as customer service. However, this a habit that you should definitely break. Think about customer service as the way that your business actually makes money. When you have strong customer service initiatives, then your customers are going to be happier and therefore, buy more products from you, rather than from your competitors. That’s the best kind of ROI that there is!
3. Making It Hard to Do Business with You
The next habit that you want to break if you want to build a loyal customer base is making it hard for customers to do business with you. This is something that a lot of businesses do because they just don’t know that they are not providing a good customer experience. However, let’s take a look at some examples. When you’re buying a case for your smartphone and you have to buy from a company, what would you think if you got the phone case and it didn’t come with the features you wanted? Or if you were buying a new TV and you couldn’t find anyone around in the store to help you out?
Many companies just don’t know that they should be improving in some of these areas. However, you should want to make sure that your customers don’t have to expend extra energy to do business with your company. All they want to do is get in and get out with the product or service they were looking for. The quicker and more efficient you make that process, the more likely it is that they are going to continue doing business with you in the long-run.
This is even more relevant when you are talking about letting customers know about the service or product you are offering. Customers are seldom equipped with knowledge regarding service they want to avail; therefore, it is the duty of the service providers to make sure that the customer is made familiar with it. For instance, if a person is new to the yoga class, he must be first introduced with the vocabulary before starting the class. That way the customer can relate more to the class.
4. Forgetting About How the Customer Feels
One of the worst habits that so many businesses make when dealing with customers is to just see them as numbers and to not remember that these are human beings you are dealing with. And as human beings, these customers have feelings and emotions that you definitely need to take into account. If you don’t do this, then you risk the customer thinking that you don’t care about them and their experience.
If you are selling sandwiches to your customers, then make sure that those sandwiches are the best ones that they’ve ever tasted. They will remember those emotions that they felt when eating that amazing sandwich and will come back for more. Emotions stay with us longer than those slogans you might be using to draw people in. If you are a frontline staff member, be sure to try to make the customer smile or laugh. Those positive emotions are going to be what that customer will remember about their visit to your store.
5. Failing to Follow Up Even After the Issues Have Been Resolved
We tend to remember most what happened to us in the most recent time period. That means that when you don’t follow up with your customer after an issue has been resolved, all they’re going to remember is that they had an issue with your product or service and continue to be negative towards your company. This is a habit that too many businesses get themselves into. You might think that just solving the issue is enough, but it’s definitely not if you want a long-lasting customer relationship.
Make sure to follow up with them afterward and check how their experience was and if there is anything else that you can do for them. When you do this, they are going to remember this positive experience much more vividly than the negative experience that they had with your product.
Each of these habits is ones that you’ve got to break ASAP if you want to build a loyal customer base and ensure a lot of profit for years to come.
