After years of studying the ways improving customer experience can help your company increase customer loyalty and retention, I’ve helped correct some of the worst possible solutions you should avoid at all costs. And they all seemed like good ideas once, at least to someone!
Here are some of the worst customer experience solutions I dare you to try for yourself:
1. Hire yourself a ninja!
To run your social media customer service efforts, you will want to hire a social media “ninja.” Gurus and jedis are acceptable, too. They will attract fans and followers using tactics only people in this category understand! Customer service inquiries will be taken by attack and fixed quickly as they don’t waste their time on the emotional stuff.
This guy means business!
2. Make it flashy!
For a fun and exciting online experience, aim to make your website look something like this:
And the more information you can put forward at once, the better. Your visitors will feel as if they’re on a treasure hunt!
3. Communicate like a machine.
The colder and more impersonal, the better. Customers just love to lose their sense of identity in a transaction. Don’t forget to start each letter with “Dear Valued Customer” instead of personalizing their name. This is especially true when sending a notice of cancellation or change in service.
Getting creative and using numbers as if customers were part of an assembly line is another approach to try:
4. Faster means better. Chop chop!
It’s important to track the right metrics. What better way to serve customers than to get them off the phone as quickly as possible? That’s why I’m a big fan of the “Time On Call” metric. It encourages call center reps to hang up on individuals who are just taking too long to explain the issue.
5. Be ruthless!
Finally, enlightened leadership is important to ensure you engage your employees to deliver the customer experience you’ve carefully designed.Who can help execute your vision? I’ve heard this guy is looking for his next opportunity, and he’s proven a lot about his leadership abilities!
Sometimes the worst customer experience solutions seem like great ideas until they are put into action. We all makes mistakes! That’s why honest evaluation of the total customer experience is critical.
Image credits: SethW, Joel Gonsalves via Creative Commons License
