The customer is always right. Almost all successful businesses worldwide operate by this motto. Yet, we often acknowledge disagreements among our representatives and customers.
Despite being learned and well-trained to handle complex customer queries, it’s not unusual for businesses to witness conflicts among their customers and support representatives.
Whether the conflict is initiated by a frustrated customer or an annoyed support representative, identifying the cause comes later. What needs to be prioritized here is settling the disagreement as soon as possible.
And here are the 7 ways you can do that.
So, without further ado.
Let’s get started.
1. Improved Training
This is more of a precautionary measure that you take to avoid unforeseen disagreements with your customers or conflicts.
If you frequently witness disagreements between the customers and your representatives, the chances are you haven’t trained your team well.
A well-trained representative knows how to handle disagreements with customers without having to lose their cool. In this situation, it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong. What matters is winning your customer’s confidence back.
So, even if you’ve come across a finicky customer, you should interact with them politely and get their concerns resolved. And you develop this mindset with training and experience.
2. Customer Insights
Data plays a key role in helping you achieve excellence in every domain and customer success is no exception.
Around 67% of marketers use data to offer personalized experiences that help improve customer engagement and retention. Another study reports that for 95% of people, access to customer data is one of the biggest challenges.
Insights about the needs, preferences, and behavior of your customers can help you resolve disagreements with your customers easily or even prevent them from occurring in the first place.
3. Reassurance
Listening to what your customers have to say is the key to offering customer service that goes a long way.
Customers often use harsh words when they think that their concerns are not heard or an issue takes longer than usual to be resolved.
When that happens, your customers don’t expect empty promises but genuine concern from your end and reassurance that their queries don’t go unnoticed. So, be as thorough as you can when sharing the details with them concerning their problem.
Even if a customer doesn’t cooperate, stay calm and reassure them that their issues would be resolved and you’re trying your best to make it quick.
Remember, 90% of purchase decisions are influenced by customer reviews. So, it’s best that you offer seamless after-sales services to your current customers. It helps you boost the brand’s goodwill and build trust that contributes to positive word of mouth.
4. Give Answers
Customer service representatives often ask a series of questions when reached out by customers. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you need to ask questions in order to explore a customer’s query in detail.
But, it’s highly recommended that you give a few answers as well. It can be infuriating for customers to answer a series of questions but not get any answers in return from you.
This is one of the reasons why around 34% of customers incline more toward customer support facilitated by chatbots instead of a company’s representatives. Because chatbots are programmed to give predefined answers that are in line with different scenarios and use cases.
5. Responding to Negative Reviews
No business likes negative reviews or feedback from its customers. That’s normal. They just want their customers to bring in more people by recommending their brand to others.
This often leads businesses to throw customer reviews under the rug and ignore their feedback entirely. This is an unwise tactic as not responding to customer reviews may increase your churn by 15%.
A customer seldom posts a negative review without consulting the issue with your customer support representatives. So, if a customer posts a negative review, it’s highly likely that their issue remains unresolved.
The best thing to do here is to respond to those negative reviews. Consider it a second chance to retain a dissatisfied or churned customer.
Even if you are unable to retain the original poster, your response would be a nice gesture. It may lead you to evade the backlash from other customers and avoid unpleasant confrontations in the future.
6. Allow Customers to Let It All Out
Sometimes, you’re not the first representative a customer has talked to. You never know how many times a customer has reached out to your team in order to get the issue resolved but found no success.
In this case, it’s highly likely for you to fall victim to the anger building inside your customers due to the incompetence of your fellow representatives.
And when that happens, allow your customers to let it all out. Let them express their feelings and listen to what they have to say. Once they’ve let all of their frustration out, they’d eventually calm down.
And that’s when you ask them about their concern in a very polite way and assure them that you’d do your best to get the issue fixed as soon as possible.
7. Choose Your Words Carefully
When you’re in a disagreement with your customers, choose your words very carefully. In the heat of the moment, even the best of us end up saying things that we later regret. So, try not to say anything that does more harm than good.
It’s best to have a neutral tone when interacting with your customers. Neither agree nor disagree with what they say and even don’t offer your own opinions. Also, never speak ill of the company, even if it’s just to console your grieving customers.
Be empathic towards your customers. Address their concerns to the best of your capabilities but don’t overpromise.
It’s a Wrap
There you have it. The 7 ways to effectively solve disagreements with your customers. The implications of the recommendations may vary as per the scenarios and customer characteristics. So, try the ones that pique your interest and see if they work for you.
