Covering the basics is important for any customer service department and customer service hotline. How well is your customer service department handing these ten common errors?
1. Lack of Empathy
This call might be the 100th or 1,000th time your service representative has heard this issue, but it’s always important to empathize with the customer, showing and shagging their concerns.
2. Inadequate Customer Service Staff Training
Training customer service representatives is the foundation for success. Poorly trained staff will exacerbate issues, not resolve them.
3. Trying to Win the Argument
Staff should never try to prove a point or win an argument with a customer. This has to be covered thoroughly in training, and reinforced on an ongoing basis.
4. Difficult to Reach Customer Service
If your business lacks a 24/7 customer service hotline, you should start thinking about implementing one immediately. Failure to answer calls promptly is like hanging an “Out to Lunch” sign on your door. When customer service is difficult to reach, customer frustration runs high!
5. Towing the Company Line
Treating customers in a similar way to a poorly run state car registry, by providing standard policy responses and rhetoric, you’re placing your customers on a path to become former customers. Try to determine when standard responses are simply inadequate and escalate the issue toward resolution.
6. Poor Organization and Inadequate Notes
Take copious and detailed notes to ensure the essence of the issue is captured. If follow-up is required, or another service representative needs to take over, proper organization and detailed notes can help ensure the customer issue will get resolved.
7. The Forward Pass – Passing Off the Problem
One of the greatest sources of frustration happens when a customer is transferred to another person or department, but that resource cannot help them resolve their issue. Training and documentation can help avoid this pitfall. Focus on resolving this issue, not on passing off the problem.
8. Auto Reply or Canned Responses
Canned replies from email, auto responders, phone trees or in person is not a recipe for customer retention. Customers can quickly tell if your service department is really trying to resolve their issue, or treating them like a commodity.
9. Not Listening and Understanding
Listening to customers and truly understanding their issue is one of the key paths to resolution. Employee hiring practices and training is essential in accomplishing this. Incorporating empathy also plays a key role to successful customer resolution and retention.
10. Not Following Through
If you promise your customer that something will be resolved in 24 hours, make sure it is, and follow-up to ensure the customer is satisfied. This may seem like an oversimplification, but many customer service hotlines fail to do this, often relating to inadequate methodologies, systems and workflow.
Though these issues may seem basic, many customer service teams fail to execute these on a consistent basis. If your customer service team or customer service hotline is looking to refine systems and methodologies, contact the experts at ServiceCheck.