5 reasons for bad customer service
Customer service that kills sales? That sounds funny, but it is meant seriously. Every customer contact influences the customer relationship and ideally leads to higher customer loyalty and brand retention. A lever that by far not every company uses adequately.
Customer communication means brand building. However, good customer service, perfectly coordinated customer communication across all channels and sales-oriented advice are rather rare to find, according to the service and consulting company AC Süppmayer GmbH, which specializes in the core areas of data protection and quality monitoring. As great as the chance of customer satisfaction is, the potential for customer annoyance is unfortunately also great: unnecessarily long processing times, lack of conversation, poor e-mail text modules and multiple contacts due to incorrect or incomplete processing. These are just a few of the typical cost drivers that lead to real customer churn. If one takes a closer look at the reasons for poor service, five topics dominate.
5 top reasons for poor customer service
- Control of external service providers: Service providers in customer service are often paid per contact. The interest of the service provider is therefore to handle as many contacts as possible per time unit.Unfortunately, quality often falls by the wayside.
- No regular measurements : To check the quality in a production only twice a year would be unthinkable. The same applies to customer service. How are employees supposed to know their strengths and potential for improvement if there is no regular feedback on quality?
- Inadequate onboarding in the home office: Covid-19 has fundamentally changed the induction process. The usual models, for example active support by managers in customer service, are currently not possible. However, the original onboarding quality can often not be maintained through pure online training.
- Exclusive control via questioning techniques such as NPS: NPS is a valid method, and customer feedback is a mandatory part of the control. However, it should never stand alone.We let the feedback flow as a variable into the overall evaluation of the service. It is important to note that positive or negative feedback does not necessarily mean that customer service has acted correctly or incorrectly.
- Tayloristic working: People seek meaning and purpose in their work. Customer service employees are often driven solely by productivity and have little freedom to make decisions. They are not aware of goals such as customer satisfaction scores or revenue expectations. These are not part of regular conversations with managers. Here, it is important to provide fact-based tips and promote motivation.
5 top solutions and three good news for better customer service
The first good news: There are established and good solutions for all these reasons. According to AC Süppmayer, these immediately lead to better customer service in every company. The second piece of good news: In the whitepaper of the customer service experts, interested parties learn which five solutions can be implemented directly. Solutions such as the right measurement quantity, the digitalization of quality processes and many other aspects are highlighted.
Source: AC Süppmayer
The whitepaper is available for download.
