Customer support is arguably the most important thing for your business to get right. Excellent customer service can overcome poor marketing. Years ago, it was incredibly difficult (and expensive) to replace poor customer service with even the most exceptional marketing. But that was only years ago. Today a company cannot thrive on poor customer experience no matter how reputed their brand is.
On the other hand:
No company is perfect! Every business is going to make mistakes while working with unhappy customers. It is not an easy task to diffuse someone who is highly frustrated. This leaves very little room for error when agents are dealing with angry customers. Even the most successful brands can have a bad customer service moment if they aren’t focused on the customer’s success.
Long story short:
Bad customer service is impossible to avoid, but you can handle it in a way that saves your brand from looking bad. If you are a company that wants to prevent these instances from affecting your business, you will need to know what inadequate customer support looks like and how you can overcome it. So, you’d ask what is the universal interpretation of bad customer service. Here are some universally unacceptable situations:
- Long wait times and longer response times
- Poor attention to details
- Agents with a lack of knowledge about the product or service
- Unprofessional or angry behavior with customers
- Impersonal and unempathetic behavior toward customers
Companies that are guilty of these bad CX traits often face negative consequences. Many of these are challenging to overcome and can lead to a company’s failure. Please note that it is normal to make small mistakes or to encounter angry customers that are impossible to deal with. These are generally small roadblocks and don’t constitute bad customer service.
The silver lining is that even the worst of customer support habits can be corrected without detrimental damage if you work quickly enough and have robust helpdesk management software at your disposal. In this article, I will discuss the three things you could do to reverse the damaging effects of bad customer service and become a bad-CX-free brand. Let’s begin!
1. Great Customer Care Starts With Social Listening
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
Social media and the concept of social listening are new and constantly evolving. When we talk about social listening with most companies, the conversation doesn’t divert to customer perception or experience. Instead, it immediately refers to numbers and metrics, volume, scores, etc. And if you ask about social media listening in terms of customer support, the focus shifts to managing channels and other superficial aspects of customer support.
Customers, OTOH, are pioneering social media trends and are expecting brands to keep up with their fast pace. To avoid any bad customer experience, in-depth social listening is the key! Your brand cannot even afford to have a single loophole in your social media strategy.
For example, in one case, Twitter users asked a well-established carrier service provider whether or not the customer support reps could see user passwords. The company replied with a “yes” and further went on to explain how passwords are stored in their security systems.
The representative further went on and got into a heated discussion with one of the users.
This created significant security and privacy issues for the users. Three days later, the company changed its policy to protect all of its customers’ passwords. Check out the incident thread:
As we previously said we will implement further steps to secure passwords. Passwords will be salted and hashed, service agents will not be ablt to see any parts of passwords. We will implement this as quickly as possible.
— Magenta Telekom (@magentatelekom) April 9, 2018
Tl;dr
You must have a game plan for any and every potential mishap. Your agents must be able to handle such incidents without getting frustrated with the customers.
Just remember one thing:
206 million active Twitter users will read whatever you/your agents/brand representative write. So, the content has to be mindful and inoffensive at the least.
2. Capture What the Customers Want
Brands often fail across digital channels because they are insufficiently unaware of the real needs and preferences of the customers. Customers must have an unprecedented number of options to engage with companies. This includes everything from traditional channels to an ever-growing array of digital modes. Many organizations are hence investing in digital channels in an effort to replace traditional modes of engagement.
For example, Amazon has built self-service and e-care capabilities, but with a critical difference. Plus, Amazon also steers customers to the channels that are best suited to their preferences while also offering digital live interactions and company-initiated contact. Amazon has designed an omnichannel customer-care strategy where live agents prominently handle complex requests, demonstrate empathy and resolve issues quickly.
3. Use Advanced Helpdesk Management Software
Ask the following questions while choosing helpdesk management software:
- What are the requirements (and goals) of your team?
- Is it easy to integrate with your CRM?
- Is it easy to set up?
- Is it scalable and remote-friendly?
- Does it help you offer an omnichannel experience?
- Does it replace your existing shared inbox and ease the overall flow?
- Are the reporting and analytics robust enough?
- Does it support automation?
- Does it have autoresponders and canned responses?
- How many users can your helpdesk ticketing system handle at once?
If the answer to most of the above questions is “NO,” it’s a sign that you need to adopt a new help desk system for your brand. The more thoroughly you answer these questions, the closer you’ll get to pick the right helpdesk tool.
The Bottomline
We live in a world where companies are offering advanced technologies, such as predicting issues before the customer explains their reason to call. This “WOW moment” is what customers are looking for from the brands they interact with. These technologies enable companies to implement a service backbone and serve omnichannel customer experience.
Thankfully, most support processes can be automated if you pick the right software solution. If you’re looking to manage your online reputation, identify at-risk customers, improve customer responsiveness, and improve your leads, Biztech’s DeskXpand will do you well.
DeskXpand comes with the latest ticket automation and omnichannel features that help you deliver a more cohesive, flexible, and integrated customer experience across all channels. It is made by functional and ISO27001-certified experts with 14+ years of industry experience. We aim to help brands achieve complete visibility and attain a high-resolution rate through customer support software. Take a free trial and find out.
