Customer Service

Research by Deloitte and Touche reported that businesses that prioritize customers are a whopping 60% more profitable than those that don’t. And that 1 in 4 customers would pay 10% more just for better customer service as per ShepHyken’s 2021 Achieving Customer Amazement Report.

Inefficient or absence of customer service tools like help desk ticketing software can guarantee more customer acquisition – for your competitors!

Here are the top 5 frustrations customers can have with your help desk ticketing system and ways to solve them.

5 Frustrating Help Desk Things and Ways to Avert Them

See if any of these holds true for your business.

1. Lengthy automated voice menus (no agent in sight)

Customers reach out to your customer service department only when they are displeased and need immediate assistance. More often than not, they’d want to speak with an agent asap.

And for them to go through a lengthy automated voice menu in the IVR that won’t lead anywhere (at least not quickly or easily) is just going to make things worse.

Solutions

• Design your voice menus so customers can easily connect with a live agent.
• Use automation to aid agents, not for them to alienate customers.
• Create an omnichannel experience to ease the conversation.
• Let customers know asap the next availability of an agent if there’s none at the moment through a ticketing system.

2. Getting transferred from one department to another

One of the most annoying things customers go through is when they’re asked to go from one department to another — here, along with the delay in query resolution, they also have to repeat their pain to agents multiple times.

Moreover, this leaves a negative impression on your customers, such negative experiences with time are likely to repulse them.

Solutions

In this case, deploying a help desk ticketing software can help in the following ways:

• Notify your customers automatically as soon as their query is received through its ticketing feature.
• Agents can tag their peers, so they are informed about the issue and the customer.
• Categorize queries and automatically route them to the relevant agent or department.
• Agents should explain the present situation in detail to the customer so that they understand why they need more time.
• Agents should ask permission to transfer the call and ask if the customer needs any answers from them before transferring.

3. Slow response times

According to Forrester, 66% of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. The first response time, or FRT, is the most vital KPI to track customer happiness. As the name suggests, First Response Time is the time it takes for a business to reach out to a customer after the latter has reached out with a query. The lower the average FRT is, the better customer experience you’re delivering. So, how do you deliver fast response times?

Solutions

• Investing in help desk software with a ticketing system will also help here. Automatically sending tickets upon the receipt of queries reduces FRTs to bare minimum.
• Invest in technologies like live chat and chatbot; however, live chat will need a live agent present, and chatbots can only answer FAQs. But, both these tools can be integrated with a ticketing system. When an agent is unavailable for live chat or a query needs to be routed to an agent from a chatbot, tickets can be sent.

4. Uninformed help desk agents

This issue occurs less often than the rest but is the most frustrating one. It is the job of the sales and support staff to help people with information and resolution, and it is a major drawback for a business when their sales or support staff is unable to do so.

This doesn’t mean that your agents need to provide an immediate response to all the queries, or they cannot put the customer on hold or can’t transfer the call to a different agent. It means that when a customer has gone through all of this but still hasn’t received the answer they were looking for.

Solutions

• Train your staff.
• Create a collaborative infrastructure for your agents with an IT ticketing system.
• Have a cloud-based knowledge base library.

5. Not being called back

Not calling a customer back or delaying in doing so is frowned upon. Generally, delaying a call for more than 24 hours is a bad practice.

Doing either of these things can erode a customer’s trust in your brand. It makes them feel that your business is unreliable, doesn’t care about its customers, and just has a subpar way of doing things in general.

Solutions

• A ticketing software can help here as well, as it has the feature of including a reminder/alert to notify agents of outstanding tickets.
• Offer to call feature on live chat and when an agent is not available, send a ticket through a ticketing system giving details on when they’ll get a callback.
• Deploy an Automatic Call Back tool; here, the customer adds their number, and the system calls them as soon as a live agent is available.

Conclusion

No business needs any statistics to know how the cost of new customer acquisition is more than the cost of retention. We hope this article helps you create happy and loyal customers. For more customer retention best practices and strategies, stay tuned to www.returncustomer.com.

The first step to providing strong customer service is taken by ensuring that all employees within your company have an extensive knowledge of the inner and outer workings of your product or service. If the customer suspects that the person they’re talking too isn’t well-informed on their issue, they’ll quickly begin to lose trust in your company, which is something you want to avoid at all costs. A business’s reputation is founded primarily in the trust of their customers.

Know Your Product or Service

Not only should you know your own products, but you should know your competitors’ products as well, and where their shortcomings are in addressing your customers’ needs. This way, you can shape your support services in a way that shows your customers that you can address their needs better than the other companies can.

Prioritize Good Training

When a customer calls or shoots you an email, no matter how small and ad hoc your business may be, in order to gain their trust, they need to feel that the person they’re communicating with is competent in the service their providing. This means you should provide some level of training with regards to how to speak with customers and handle the myriad issues that will come their way. There’s a variety of resources out there for small business owners who need to up their training game, despite their small size.

Be Respectful and Listen

One of the worst things a customer can experience when interacting with support is the feeling that the person on the other end is unresponsive and uncaring. This can cause them to feel as if they’ve been betrayed and have nowhere else to turn in their quest to solve their issue. This means that, whether the request is made by email, phone, or in person, that you listen very carefully to both what is said, and what is unsaid by the customer. When interacting in person, paying attention to body language and other non-verbal cues becomes paramount. While communicating over the phone, the tone of voice is crucial as well.

Get Feedback and Use It

Anyone who’s contacted customer support is familiar with being asked to participate in a survey afterward. Despite this minor annoyance, these feedback gathering tools are actually quite important. But, they don’t always have to come in the form of a survey. It may not be popular, but asking for feedback in an immediate and informal way is perfectly acceptable as well. In fact, you may find that the customer is more honest and forthcoming that way.

Once you’ve collected the feedback you need, make sure to review it periodically and actually make the changes necessary to avoid whatever missteps have been pointed out by customers, or leverage that same feedback to improve upon and amplify the successes you’ve already achieved. Any small business must change and adapt if it wants to grow and thrive.

Always Be Friendly

Experienced business owners know that a poor attitude can cause serious harm to the relationship between you and your customers. There’s simply no excuse for it. Instead, always be friends. Simple kindness, no matter how difficult or upset the customer may be, is always in your best interest. Being nice will never make things worse than they already are, and customers are much more likely to return to a business that has treated them well.

Seasoned entrepreneurs know that business is all about forming relationships, and all relationships are built on good faith and trust. As the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously said, “Kind is the golden chain by which society is bound.”

Make Promises, But Keep Them Realistic

Your angry and flustered customers want to know that you can solve their problems, so make sure to tell them so. Make promises, but make sure they’re promises that you can keep. Know what your solution is going to be, and if you don’t have one yet, reassure the customer that you are doing everything that you can to solve their problem because, in reality, you are.

By making promises you can keep, you’re giving your customers the kind of assurance they need to calm their anxieties and place their trust in you. If you can follow through, then the trust is earned, and they’re much more likely to refer you to a friend or leave a positive review online.

Go The Extra Mile

Sometimes, you’ll need to do something to make the customer feel that tangible reality that you care. If a customer comes to you asking a simple question, consider giving them more than a simple answer. If they need to know where to find the door hinges in your hardware store, don’t just tell them it’s in aisle seven. Instead, take them to aisle seven. And if they’re looking for a contractor for their home remodeling project, don’t just tell them to ask their neighbors. Show them a good service they can use to find one.

Also, don’t be afraid to throw in something extra from time to time, whether that be a coupon code for a discount, a freebie, or just a genuine smile. You could also think of something to add your own signature flair to the interaction. For example, if you sell computer software, you could add a free software suite or free trials on top of the customer support that you provide.

About the Author

Marie Erhart is a Success Manager at FieldPulse, creators of field service software that lets you run your entire contracting business from a single app. She works with contractors to help them grow their business using best practices.

Did you know that research by Bain & Company found out that increasing customer retention rate by just 5% can increase profits by 25-95%?

If there’s one thing that always bears on the mind of businesses, it is this: What drives a customer to come back for more?

In this day and age, where cut-throat competition is rife, brand loyalty is as elusive as a dream. From expeditious customer service and product quality to brand values and convenience, there are a host of factors that influence customer satisfaction.

Even so, do there really exist enough ways to make customers visit your business and buy again? Here, we look at five ways you can improve customer retention and subsequently improve your sales.

1. Real-Time Customer Support

According to MTD, nearly 35% of consumers expect a response on social media questions or complaints within an hour, with 18% expecting an immediate response.

With proactive response behavior, result-driven conversations, and round-the-clock support, everything about real-time customer support spells customer satisfaction. By employing advanced customer support tools like live chat, you can correspond with consumers in real-time and resolve their issues instantly and provide them with frictionless customer experience.

This is probably the reason why as many as 63% of customers would come back to a website that offers this feature. With live chat software, you can embed it in your system with added features, such as cobrowsing that can enhance your first call resolution by 18% and lessen call handling time by 14%.

2. Crafting Strategies for Enhanced CX

Did you know that moderate improvement in CX can impact the revenue of a typical $1 billion company an average of $775 million over three years?

Customer data is the most valuable asset of any company and with the coming of AI, organisations can now increase CX by leveraging what they have learnt about the customer and predicting their needs. This will allow you to create custom-built, personalized strategies for different consumers.

Today, many brands are utilizing artificial intelligence in a calculated manner at key touchpoints to deliver new forms of customization, and in some cases, completely new technical capabilities. So, if you haven’t hopped onto the AI bandwagon yet, it’s time to do so.

3. Customer Reward Programs

Customer incentive programs or loyalty bonuses in the form of gift vouchers, free products, bonus items, etc. are an excellent way to keep customers coming back to you. By tracking metrics such as the number of orders, referrals, welcome points, loyalty points, etc., you can determine who are your most faithful customers. It is a great deal for both the customer and the brand because in return for the promise of added benefits, customers will keep visiting you time and time again while you enjoy unprecedented customer retention. Consequently, this ensures better profits and improved longevity of the business. From welcome points to the number of orders placed, there are a number of metrics you can follow to see who are your most valued customers.

4. Regular Feedback

Customer feedback is one area that is immensely advantageous for any organization should they decide to conduct it. Customer feedback helps improve products and services and it is one of the biggest benefits that consumers can provide brands. By collecting the opinion of your customers on a definite level regularly, you can gain valuable insight into what works for your brand and what does not.

This practice has a lot of merits. It can help you measure customer satisfaction by asking them for their personal opinions of your products. This not only tells you how pleased your patrons are with your services, but it also tells them that their voice is heard by you. Apart from that, when you put the information you gained into practice, it shows that you genuinely care about them to deliver the best possible customer experience.

5. Amaze Visitors with Great UX Features

With great User Experience (UX) comes great loyalty. Yes, it is a lame take of an otherwise landmark movie dialogue in cinema. However, the analogy is perfect for capturing the importance of UX for enhanced customer loyalty. As the digital interface is the point of contact with your customers, you would do better to give them a frictionless and straightforward experience so that they are encouraged to prefer your products over others.

Not only does this enhance the value of your brand and improve its awareness through word-of-mouth-appreciation, but it also helps you redefine customer loyalty by knowing why and how you have matched or failed their expectations in certain areas. So much so that, Forbes reported intentional and strategic user experience to be able to boost conversion rates by as much as 400%.

Conclusion

All in all, it doesn’t matter what the size of your organization is, employing these practices is necessary to ensure that customers keep visiting you over and over again. Revamping your current strategies to be more customer-centric can breathe new life into your business. You can do so by providing services that match your customer’s expectations.

About the Author
Sam Makad is an experienced writer and marketing consultant. His expertise lies in marketing and advertising. He helps small & medium enterprises to grow their business and overall ROI. Reach out to Sam Makad on Twitter or LinkedIn.