According to McKinsey research, companies that excelled in customer service during the 2007-08 financial crisis provided three times more returns to their shareholders than those that did not. Now that should be an eye-opener for you to dedicate your brand to excellent customer service. Thus, during an upheaval like the Covid-19 crisis that we are currently facing, organizations must take special care not to make costly customer service mistakes that can impede excellent customer service.
Here, we elaborate on the top customer service mistakes that organizations often make and how to fix them for good. Chances are you, too, are inadvertently making these mistakes. So, let’s get started.
Not understanding your customers
We all know that customer is the Holy Grail of any business. But how many of us genuinely go the extra mile to understand the customer and what he wants truly? If you’re going to provide excellent customer service, you need to understand the customer inside out. It could be about his explicit and implicit needs, past interactions with your brand, what bothers him, what his priorities are, and what it takes to offer this customer a wow moment.
The conversational data generated in your contact centers are a great place to understand the customer. Using a conversational AI platform, you can parse through all that precious data to put together a customer persona and then build on it. This way, you know what exactly a customer wants and how to delight them truly.
Not evaluating your agents’ performance
If you want to offer world-class customer service, you need to evaluate your agents’ performance continually. For that, you need data and analytics, without which it is just conjecturing. You need to make sure that you have the people with the right skill set and mindset. You should always monitor their ways of communicating with the customers, how customers are feeling about it, and so on.
For that, you need the right AI and automation tools in place. Having a conversational automation and analytics application is half the battle won. This type of contact center software solution will help you understand how your agents are performing, their weaknesses, how to improve their skills, and a whole host of other aspects. This solution can also let you offer the right training to the agents, give them real-time alerts and notifications, set reminders, course correct whenever they go astray. Hence, customers get the best customer service at all times.
Not building customer relationships
When contact center agents communicate with a customer, they think of it as just a single event. But that’s not how customers look at it, and that’s not how your business should look at it either. Customers prefer brands that value them, empathize with them, and truly understand their goals and aspirations. Thus, agents need to consider that building long-term customer relationships is also in the business’s good interest.
It is a fact that acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. So, every agent in your contact center needs to understand that building and nurturing long-term customer relationships is of prime importance. That is when a business truly flourishes, and each happy existing customer will bring back many more new customers. Thus, it is a win-win situation that every brand should aspire to go after, and it all starts with a customer relationship built well for the long haul!
Want to learn more about how Uniphore can help you get off to a great start in excellent customer service?
Get in touch with us, and we will help you avoid costly customer service pitfalls for good!