What is worse than bad customer service?
Nothing. That’s the correct answer.
Why? Because consumers turn to your brand’s support team when things go wrong, and expect to be taken care of, and maybe even a little bit comforted for their bad experience.
It’s actually not a huge difference from our private relationships, because if we are treated wrongly, we expect an apology and something to make it up to us, right?
And it’s not an entirely bad idea to think about our customers as we do our friends.
Our friends are our biggest supporters, and they will speak well about you, be loyal, promote you, and want you to succeed. However, if you cross them, they will most likely spread the bad vibes to others in their circle, leaving you as the bad seed of the bunch. The average person tells 15 other people when they’ve had a bad customer service experience. Yikes…
But we all make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are due to external factors that are out of our control.
Real friends though, are also forgiving.
How to stay friends with your customers
With more opportunity comes higher demand, and higher demand means a whole lot more damage control. Consumers can seem extremely high maintenance nowadays, but it’s mostly due to the fact that they know what they can have, and don’t want to settle for less.
Commercial brands have to treat their clients as if they were high-end, luxury shoppers who deserve all and more. Of course this can be frustrating, but unfortunately you have to adapt to be able to compete.
But you know what? Attracting a new customer is 7 times as expensive as retaining an already existing one, and a 5% customer retention rate can increase profits by up to 95%. So you better start scratching those backs and polishing those apples before someone else does.
One reason some companies fail when it comes to customer service is being understaffed, resulting in stressed out team members, long waiting times or customers even being forgotten. And since good customer service is ranked number one when it comes to the level of trust people have in a company, this is just a huge no-no for any brand who want to be considered legitimate.
Luckily there’s a solution to the problem that doesn’t mean you have to recruit more staff or compromise on the CX: Interactive support videos.
With pre-recorded interactive video, you can create intricate support funnels that doesn’t only answers all the FAQ:s you can think of, but also show your customers practical things with a human entity behind it. Call it high-end-self-service-customer-service. Or just really, really clever.
Imagine cloning your very best team member to both provide top notch support, but also educating the rest of the staff by doing so.
Millennials are the big spenders right now, and they call the shots on shopping demands and expectations. And as much as many of them are fine with self-service, it has to be very high-quality self-service, so bots, long texts and chats simply won’t cut it anymore.
A staggering 90% of consumers say they have switched to a competitor due to poor customer service, and so we will leave you with a quote from the great Bill Gates:
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
