Although all businesses strive to provide excellent customer service, not all of them get it right always. There are several factors that usually affect service delivery in a negative way, leading to poor customer satisfaction.
Customers are the lifeline of any business, and if they can’t keep them satisfied, happy, and loyal, nothing else aimed at business success matters. Without preventing factors that can hinder quality customer service, organizations will endlessly struggle and close their doors in no time.
In this post, we will discuss factors that lower the quality of customer service delivery and how to prevent them from helping you avoid poor customer satisfaction. Keep reading for more.
Factors that can lead to poor customer satisfaction and how to avoid them
If you do a customer feedback audit in your company, you’ll identify that most complaints are related to service delivery. But what common reasons can lead to bad customer service, and how can you avoid poor customer satisfaction?
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Not being available when needed
No matter how you provide support to your customers by phone, live chat, or email systems, your customers expect great and timely replies. So when you do not accept their chat requests, receive an automated text, or are directed to an auto-responder machine, they’ll see that you don’t mind their interest, or the business is either nonexistent.
Fortunately, dealing with this situation is relatively easy. For email chat requests, ensure you minimize or eliminate the use of automated replies; for phone support methods, indicate the times you will be available to give assistance. And for live chats interactions, never miss any engagement if you are online.
If you know you won’t be available to provide services on any of the platforms above, enable the voicemail system for customers to at least drop you a message.
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Not hiring the right individuals
It goes without saying the quality of your customer service delivery is directly related to the quality of your workforce. After all, the people you employ are the ones interacting directly with your customers.
Businesses struggling with the quality of their customer support often don’t take enough time to recruit and select the right people for the job.
To prevent this mistake and avoid poor customer satisfaction, run a rigorous and careful screening process for all your potential candidates and ensure you they have the necessary skills, attitude, and experience to handle customers efficiently in diverse situations.
Although a process of this caliber will definitely take some time and resources, it will pay off in the long run.
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Inadequate employee training
Lack of adequate employee training is among the most common causes of poor customer service. As stated before, your service team interacts directly with your customers, and with insufficient training, they are likely to make simple mistakes affecting the customer service experience.
Ensure you dedicate enough resources and time to provide consistent employee training and development to help update your employee skills. They need to have enough training about your business products, services, and targets and all the necessary skills to serve a diverse customer demographic.
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Lack of belief in the company and its products
Another possible cause of low-quality customer service is when, for any reason, employees are not able to adapt to the business or believe in the products or services they are offering. This lack of belief is usually caused by several reasons, but mostly the blame is majorly on the products or the company structure.
Unluckily, many companies respond to this problem by ignoring it and continuing normally, which only worsens things. Instead, businesses should be honest with their approaches and implement the best only after understanding the root cause.
Talk to your staff and ask them why they don’t believe in the company and products, and if they have some suggestions, involve them.
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Lack of customer respect
The most important thing about customer service is treating your clients with respect and with no exceptions. However, after a long day at work, customer service attendants may slip and get distracted, leading to poor customer satisfaction.
Failing to pay attention to your clients shows a disrespectful picture and can make them angry and leave to your competitors. One of the ways to avoid this dilemma is to allow your support assistants to get breaks between their work schedules.
Author credit: By Tomwsulcer – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19973232
Not only will it allow them to refuel themselves, but it will also make them motivated and productive in the long run, ensuring that you keep happy and satisfied consumers.
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Lack of empathy
It is natural for many people to become different from their customers after staying in the same job for an extended period of time. But if a new employee starts displaying a lack of empathy from the beginning, it can result in more serious problems.
In such cases, it is advisable to take these employees to appropriate employee training and development programs or remove them from the position. For those who have served in the company for long, you can provide them with appropriate incentives to aid them through their duties and allow them to get breaks to refresh and focus.
Factors to focus on to deliver customer satisfaction
Although the definition of a satisfied customer may vary across businesses, it basically refers to someone who thinks your company is efficient in product and service delivery. When asked about your business, they will leave positive reviews and comments.
The primary objective of every company is to avoid poor customer satisfaction by providing quality services and making them loyal advocates of the business.
To ensure you provide excellent customer service and make a loyal customer base, it is not enough to satisfy them. You need to work on other essentials of customer service, such as client understanding, technology, and service delivery, so that they would get a consistent positive customer experience.
Customer understanding
Your customers should know that you are not only making a profit from them, they want to ensure they are buying from a business that understands them and cares about their interests. Clients prefer organizations that remember their preferences, provide multiple choices, and deliver personalized service.
- Choices: having multiple options for your products and service goes a long way to improving your conversion rates. Although having variations might not seem much in terms of marketing, but several studies have proven that the more alternatives clients have, the more control they have over the buying process. This strategy needs to be done cautiously because having many choices may be overwhelming, leading to “choice overload,” which may lead to no purchase made at all.
- Preference: understanding your clients means knowing their way of doing things and how they like it. A business that knows and delivers services according to preferences, such as payment systems, communication channels, and delivery service, has an ultimate understanding of its market.
- Personalization: personalized service refers to providing individual attention to customers. Calling clients by their names, knowing their time of shopping, or their favorite products are some of the ways of giving personalized service. According to a report by Epsilon, 80% of consumers prefer buying from businesses that provide personalized customer service. So, it goes without saying that personalization is a worthy investment.
Service
Good service is always described as warm, polite, and friendly. Although it might be easy for organizations to meet these factors, true customer satisfaction needs more than attentive employees. Great customer service must also ensure that clients’ needs are met.
Most customers require intuitive and convenient customer service that provides exactly what they need within the set timelines.
Technology
Technology has become an integral part of operating a business to achieve true customer satisfaction. Website blogs, social media, and software are essential factors that give companies a competitive edge.
For you to avoid poor customer satisfaction with technology, ensure your business channels are accessible, load pages quickly, and are easy to navigate.
Conclusion
Customer satisfaction is integral to your business’s future, including continuity and success. Not only do satisfied clients come back and turn to repeat customers, but they also become good ambassadors to your business since they share their experiences with the outside world.
No marketing strategy that works well than word of mouth from your customers. Create some time to analyze your current customer satisfaction rates, what are the causes of poor experience, and implement the points discussed in this article to avoid poor customer satisfaction.
In summary, poor customer satisfaction is caused by the inability to provide support when needed by clients, not hiring the right staff, lack of empathy, inadequate employee training, lack of belief in the company and its products, and lack of customer respect. As a business leader, ensure you avoid these issues as much as possible to provide consistent excellent customer service.