Guest Blog: Struggling with Bad Customer Service? Top 4 Factors Your Business Needs to Investigate

This week we feature an article by Laura Bourne who shares four important factors that can help you achieve success and avoid customer service problems. – Shep Hyken

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. – Bill Gates

There is no denying that loyal customers are the bread and butter of an organization. Retaining current customer satisfaction while securing more is fundamental to the growth of a business. If customer service is something your company is not strong with, it is imperative that an effective strategy is employed before doing anything else. Research from NewVoiceMedia discovered that approximately $62 billion is lost by U.S businesses each year as a result of bad customer experiences. Make sure that your organization is not the one losing money. Solve your customer service problems before they exacerbate by looking at the following factors which are possibly attributed to the issues.

1. Employee Standards

You have likely heard the phrase ‘treat your employees like you want the customer treated,’ well it works. Look at every touchpoint of customer contact in your business. These touchpoints are a representation of the company and should be demonstrating excellent customer service skills. For example, a sales team may be the first point of contact for customers. Without even realizing it, their approach to dealing with customers may be damaging the company’s reputation. If you think this is the case with your business, do something about it. Ensure staff receives additional training, monthly performance reviews and most of all, motivation. If your staff is lacking motivation, it is important to look at why this is happening. Better employee incentives may need to be in place to remedy it.

2. Business Management System

To provide excellent customer service, you need to decide on an effective management system that keeps your business efficient. For instance, a building maintenance company that deals with customers daily, either online or face-to-face, may find it beneficial to invest in field management software. This kind of cloud-based software typically provides features to help manage your business like job tracking, scheduling and invoicing.

Moreover, it might be that you need to develop your company’s leadership effectiveness. Creating a mentorship program that provides staff with one-to-one coaching to improve their skills. Just remember, implementing a new business management strategy takes time and money. Therefore, ensure to conduct enough research and discussions with colleagues before deciding on one. Once you have found a system that works for you, customers will notice better efficiency with your business and will be impressed.

3. Social Media Engagement

It is no secret that social media continues to increase in popularity by the day for customer support. In a 2017 report by Conversocial, it was stated that customer service interaction made via Twitter have increased by 250% in the last two years. Knowing this, it is vital to get your business clued up on all social media platforms. If you are already established on social media, look at ways in which you can engage with your customers more. Posting regularly, using videos to promote your brand and responding swiftly to comments/messages are all fantastic ways of utilizing social media. With a dedicated marketing team as well as an improved customer service team, you will see a difference in how people perceive your business.

Nowadays, most people are on-the-go and use portable devices such as mobile phones and tablets to complete tasks. To catch up with modern times, it might be time for your business to make the upgrade to mobile functionality. By having more than one platform for users to access your product or service, this gives flexibility to your customers.

4. Customer Feedback

Looking at feedback from customers – especially existing ones – is the greatest way of finding the underlying problems. Whether your customer service team needs to be quicker when answering queries or customers need regular check-ups with a product/service, finding out what will please your customers is one step closer to a successful business. Of course, the most obvious way of collecting feedback is through customer surveys. Other ways are conducting phone interviews, creating short polls through social media, implementing comment boxes at the end of your website pages and using an emailing system. A rigorous commitment to collecting, organizing and sharing customer feedback will give you a clear view as to how your company can improve its customer service approach.

Hopefully, by following these tips your business can make the necessary changes it needs to improve customer relations. Creating a lasting impression with your customers is vital not only to business success but how your company grows with the modern age and the reputation it builds.

Laura Bourne works as Content Marketing Assistant for Joblogic, one of the UK’s leading providers of service management software. Joblogic provides building maintenance contractors with a logical workflow system that is the top choice for hundreds of service management companies. Laura enjoys writing for business audiences and bringing them advice about the latest trends and new

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes Articles: Customer Service Professionals Gather In Las Vegas For CEX … And Much More