By Aaron Agius
Providing excellent customer service is fundamental to business success. Fifty-five percent of consumers say they’d spend more money with a company that guarantees them good customer service. And it’s also predicted that by 2020, the customer experience will be more important to consumers than price or product.
However, not all companies get their customer service right, with U.S. companies losing more than $75 billion annually due to poor customer service.
Even with the best intentions, it’s easy to develop blind spots that become barriers between you and your customers. The good news is they can be easily fixed. Here are six blind spots that might be holding you back and how best to rectify them:
1. Focusing on first impressions at the expense of the last
It’s natural for businesses to focus their energies on getting new customers through the door. Making a good first impression is what starts the relationship with a customer and determines whether they’ll get on board with your brand. Hopefully, they’ll even make a purchase.
There’s nothing wrong with making an excellent first impression. But it’s also important to leave your customers with a great memory of you once they’ve made a conversion.
To fix this, map out the whole buyer journey, from your customers’ first contact with your brand, through to when they make a purchase and beyond. Next, identify all the opportunities for both reactive and proactive customer service—on- and offline—within that journey. If you notice that your customer support is heavily weighted to the start of the buyer journey, then look at what you can do to balance that towards the end.
- Do send out automated emails to thank customers for their purchases and to keep in touch with recommendations and promotions?
- Have you made it easy for your customers to reach you with problems after a purchase? (e.g., chatbots, social media, email, telephone)
- Have you provided content to help people use their product or purchase? (e.g., video tutorials, written manuals, blog posts)
2. Not sweating the small stuff
Good customer service isn’t about the grand gestures. It’s the little things that count. Too many brands try too hard to offer incentives and promotions to improve their customers’ experience, but miss the subtler, textual impressions.
Try to focus the minutiae of your customer service. Look in particular at:
- Your tone of voice—Are you friendly, helpful and empathetic?
- Consistency—Are you providing a seamless experience on- and offline, and throughout your website, social media, ads, and emails?
- Support offered—Have you clearly signposted ways to find support?
3. Making your customers work for what they need
Central to offering excellent customer service is ensuring your customers achieve their goals in the quickest time possible. Not only does this keep the revenue flowing, but it makes for happy customers, too.
A cardinal sin is overcomplicating the customer journey. If a customer can’t find what they’re looking for in just a few clicks, they’re likely to get frustrated and go to your competitor.
To avoid this, think about your target customers and define their online goals. Go through your ads, social media, and website and ask yourself a few questions:
- How easy is it to reach your goal?
- Are there clear CTAs to click through the customer journey?
- What roadblocks are preventing you from achieving your goal?
- Is there enough information about the product/brand to assist the decision-making process?
- Is it easy to find the right support on your site?
4. Being company first—not customer first
It’s easy for companies to slip into a company-focused mindset. When your product or service is central to your world, and you’re running a business on limited time and resources and not yet turning a profit, it can be tough to step outside of yourself and put your customers first. But companies that don’t put their customers at the center of the business will see poor customer satisfaction and, in turn, low sales.
To ensure your customers are at the front and center of your business, spend some time doing customer persona “workshopping.” Working on personas helps you to identify the goals and obstacles of your customers, and then how your business can help meet those needs. HubSpot offers a Make My Persona tool.
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5. Creating too many, or not enough, channels
Whilst you want the help desk to be a last option for your customers, it’s critical your customers can get in touch with you when they need to. However, you can severely damage your customer service by either providing too many options for support or, conversely, not enough.
If you have endless options for customer support you’ll need to be able to keep on top of all of it, or else some queries might slip through the gaps. On the other hand, if you don’t provide enough modes of contact, then you might alienate some segments of your audience.
My tip is to get a good balance, using a mix of traditional and modern lines of communication, sticking to four or five contact options, such as:
- An email address and phone number
- Social media (Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram)
- Live chat or chat bot on your website
- SMS or WhatsApp
6. Lacking accountability
The ability to say sorry is the mark of a good customer service team. Even if it’s unclear who is to blame, a simple apology and swift resolution go a long way.
It’s estimated that even when a customer experiences a problem, they are willing to repurchase from a brand once a sincere apology is received. Taking accountability for a problem is therefore the difference between retaining or losing a disgruntled customer.
A top tip for taking accountability is to make sure you start your communication—whether it be email, a response to a review, or a reply to a social media comment—with a short, sincere apology for the issue. Follow this with a resolution if it’s simple fix, or refer people to an email address or phone number to get in touch.
For more on writing an excellent apology, here’s a guide from HubSpot.
In summary
The way you treat your customers has a direct impact on the success—or failure—of your business. It makes the difference between whether consumers stick with you long enough to convert or, if they do make a purchase, whether they make repeat purchases in the future.
But it’s not easy to stay customer focused 100% of the time, and every company is guilty of developing blind spots. The key is to identify your own set of blind spots and to work towards rectifying them before you lose the all-important trust of your customers.
RELATED: 5 Ways to Turn Your Customer Service Team Into a Secondary Sales Force
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