Last updated - April 4, 2023
Customer service is an essential part of your business. A negative customer experience is going to hurt your business’ success.
In fact, according to a report by Forrester, a poor customer experience will cause customers to abandon their purchases. Excellent support comes with a strong relationship with your customers.
That’s why it’s essential to know the most common customer service mistakes and how you can avoid committing them:
1. Not being flexible
Here’s the thing – your customers are more than just numbers, and you should treat them that way. While policies are undoubtedly important, there might be times when rules need to be bent, with some exceptions to be made.
Ask yourself if you can be flexible to save a customer relationship. If the answer is yes, then you might consider bending the rules. If this isn’t possible, you might want to offer them an alternative solution.
After all, no one wants to hear repeatedly, “sorry, but this is our policy,” from a customer representative. There are some situations that you have to assess with an open mind.
2. Not understanding who your customer is
A brand can’t serve its customers well if they don’t understand who its customers are. It isn’t merely restricted to conventional touch points like demographics.
Other factors can include how the customer interacts with your website, their time on site, the content they use, products they purchase, and their behavior.
Before you start your ecommerce website, you must know your customer’s pulse. Understand the user’s wants and needs to analyze their pain points and challenges they encounter.
3. Not providing an omnichannel support
Customers can reach out to you on various channels. This can be via phone conversation, live chat, or social media.
You couldn’t force your customers to use a particular channel to contact you. That’s why companies that provide omnichannel support will retain more customers than those that don’t offer them.
Also, having a knowledge base or support forum that customers can access is helpful. That way, customers can solve issues independently instead of contacting you.
Your customers will also be happy if you can help them out on various channels. Satisfied customers will create more prospects for you in the long run.
4. Absence of pro-active support
Perhaps one of the most common customer support mistakes companies make is to be less proactive with customers. Over time, this can lead to customer dissatisfaction and, eventually, customer churn.
There are a number of reasons why an inadequate customer support service or a lack of skilled professionals. So, you need to ensure that your customer service team has enough knowledge of your products and services. That way, they can solve customer queries in a set amount of time.
Apart from that, the absence of proactive support also means that you’re not always making the first move to make an effort to solve service-related problems of your customers.
Not being proactive means that you or your customer service team allows issues to fester, making them a pain point, and adversely affecting the customer experience.
5. Not Listening to your customers
Listening to customers is perhaps one of the essential skills that every customer service professional should have. That way, you can offer the customer the right solutions. It’s considered a complete failure when your customer service team cannot provide the right solutions to customers.
Therefore, excellent listening skill needs to be cultivated instead of just assuming things. Aside from that, customer service agents should also be attentive when managing calls, taking notes, and ensuring that customers aren’t repeating the query. By delighting your customers, you’ll gain a broader customer base.
6. Not being able to understand the customer’s problem
Your customers expect you to know and understand their needs. So, the more that you know about them, the better you’ll be able to serve them.
Still, many businesses adopt a more random approach when dealing with customers. In other words, they don’t have a solid strategy that will stop them from understanding their customers better.
Also, if you’re not quite sure what your customers want, how can you expect to improve your products or enhance your customers’ experiences?
7. Incompetent training and tools
Your customer service team is your greatest asset. However, your customers will suffer if you don’t train them well or don’t onboard new members efficiently.
Also, since more and more support teams are transitioning to remote work because of the pandemic, your employee onboarding process must be on point. You need to provide them with the proper knowledge about your products and services. As well as the appropriate support workflow so that you can assist them properly.
In the same way, you should also be using tools such as Slack to encourage a seamless collaboration between team members. It will also empower them to access information with just a click of a button.
Suppose you’re regularly holding online meetings and video calls. If that’s the case, you might want to consider getting secure video software so that you can encourage more active internal communication within your team.
8. Inconsistency in offering excellent customer service
Your customer service team might be quick and prompt in responding to your customers. However, if they have to tap into other teams like the IT or operations department for any customer queries and those teams don’t respond to them with the needed data, this will still lead to bad customer service.
No one wants to wait long for a call after hearing from customer support. Every interaction you make with your customers should be consistent and timely across all channels. Your team should also tackle these pain points with a more positive attitude.
9. Not taking customer feedback seriously
While you certainly aren’t a magician and cannot make all your customers’ wishes come true, you should take every concern or feedback seriously. This may address the features that your products and services lack.
If it continues in the future, or you continue getting messages like these, you might consider whether or not you’ll be introducing a feature or enhancing an option.
Again, customer feedback is critical for improvement, and ignoring it may cost you a lot in the long run. But by taking them seriously, you’re showing your clients that their opinions matter and your goal is to offer products and services that will meet these specific needs and requirements.
Over to You
Your customers are an integral part of your business, and keeping them happy should be your main priority. If done right, an excellent customer experience can lead to many wins for your company. So, make sure that you avoid these customer service mistakes.
