The abundance, availability, and variety of similar products are evident in the market.
There is hardly any leverage of a ‘unique product’ that a brand can offer, and even if it does, it has its limitations.
There are different factors due to which a customer prefers or chooses to buy a product from a particular brand or company.
But the real brand differentiator for customers is –
- How are they treated?
- What is their overall purchasing experience?
- What is the company’s responsibility after you purchase the product?
That is their customer experience with the brand, from finding them to the duration of using the product.
But still, poor customer service is one of the primary factors for business failures.
Top reasons for poor customers you can hack into and find a solution to deal with it :
How Does Poor Customer Service Impact Your Company?
Loss of Current Customers
If customers regularly purchasing from you are consistently experiencing unpleasant buying experiences, they won’t hesitate to do business with some other brand.
Customers do have preferences such as reduced cost, offers and discounts, and quality of the product.
That’s also what drives their purchasing decisions. However, customer service is something they simply can’t ignore.
Most chances are that even after one bad customer service experience, they will back out and give business to your competitor.
Bleeding Profit
The overall impact of poor customer service on your company is disastrous and leaves your company bleeding profit day by day.
You would notice a downward spiral moving rapidly which prevents your company from reserving any further resources to afford the competition.
It gives the inability to continue to spend more and more on the business to improve as all the profits will drain due to loss of customers.
Negative Branding
Once more and more customers start experiencing bad customer service at your company, you can’t expect them to keep it to themselves.
They are more likely to speak out in public, leave negative reviews, rant on social media and do all kinds of negative publicity.
This is negative branding where your business will be painted with this doomed reputation of poor customer service and inadequate work ethic.
Negative branding impacts not just your current customer but more of the future customer.
After a point, it becomes extremely hard to wipe off your company from a strong imprint of a bad image.
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Loss Of Staff Members
Lack of efficient customer service training and protocols creates inefficiencies in employees and negativity at work.
They start to struggle to strive for their best, but without any proper guidance or strategy in a place, it becomes extremely challenging.
This overwhelming feeling often leaves employees to quit their job, losing employees.
Top Reasons For Poor Customer Service
Not Recruiting The Right People
Usually, the quality of the customer service you offer to your customer predominantly depends on the quality of the people you recruit.
It is understandable as it is your staff members, nonetheless interacting with your customers on a direct basis.
In fact, in a way, the people you hire for your company to interact and engage with customers are the representative of your brand and the first impression as well.
Brands who seem to be failing in their customer service are also found to be ones who do not put enough time and effort into their hiring process.
How To Deal With It?
Selecting the right employees for your company is essential for optimizing customer service and raising its quality.
Make sure you screen all your potential candidates very carefully to avoid making this mistake.
Determine their skill and see how crucial it can be for your company’s objectives. Also, see their ability to handle customers in diverse situations.
Poor Handling Of Situation
The competence of excellent customer service depends upon their capability to handle different types of situations.
They need to come up on top of the situation no matter how bad things go for the company.
Handling customers in a way that doesn’t go against them as well as the company, is not a piece of cake.
How To Deal With It?
Also, it is also their job to diffuse the extreme situation such as when a customer got angry or something went wrong on the company’s part.
It is essential to have improved communication skills and emotional intelligence to handle such situations.
So if your customer service is any less capable or trained than that, it is definitely going to hinder the quality of customer service.
Lack Of Staff Training
Training your employees can be the primary common reason for poor customer service.
Your customer service representatives are the ones who directly interact with your customers.
The lack of training of your staff is only going to lead to a consequential series of mistakes in their customer interactions.
They won’t be capable of dealing with different types of customers as well as diverse situations that demand certain strategies and skills at their disposal.
Your staff inefficiency, lack of competence and management skill
Their mistakes are going to impact your brand reputation amongst the target customers in the market eventually.
Your company needs to possess all the required information regarding your brand, business, operations, product, targets, and goals.
They must be equipped with all the skills and resources required to resolve customer issues.
Extremely Bad Telephone Customer Service Experience
Most of the companies connect to their customer, or the customers reach out to the company through the phone.
Customers expect to be treated well for their phone call regarding the purchase they made, and now when they need help, it must be given to them.
Most of the customer service complaints are often restricted to the nightmarish customer services on the phone.
Customers are also more likely to form an opinion of the company and their product through how they are treated or whether their problem is resolved or not on the phone call.
How To Deal With It?
A lot of businesses are adopting more and more different avenues to reduce telephone customer service issues.
For example, live chats, messaging, and emails have become great alternatives to customer service communication.
However, companies still need to fix and specialize their phone support for the customers.
The best way to do so is to create special segments for different types of customers, so customer service will be focused on helping only one particular type of customer.
Lack of Empathy Towards Customer
This reflects in the approach of customer service very easily, especially for the customers.
What happens is, after working so long and doing the same thing over a long period of time, most employees become indifferent to the customers and their problems.
It just becomes another problem of the day, and it is in fact, very natural.
However, if a new staff member in the company is not empathetic to customers at the beginning only, it can lead to some serious issues.
The company needs to bring their employees to a customer service training course or change the position.
It is important for a business to optimize its customer service staff in a way that they are optimal for their functioning.
Also, do multiple things to help them refocus, rejuvenate, and even more incentives to excel in their jobs.
Overwhelming Workload
It has been seen plenty of times that the reason behind the poor customer service is not incompetence of customer service.
Rather it is the companies who put too much work into limited human resources for different reasons.
It could be to save money to hire more staff or just lack of awareness or others as well.
No employee wants to overwork, especially not at the same salary. You cannot just add more hours to their schedules and expect their best.
Not Believing In Product Or Company
Another top-notch reason for poor customer service has to be the lack of belief in the product or company.
This can be due to plenty of reasons why your company employees aren’t able to connect with the administration or the brand values.
This lack of belief in the company or product is often blamed on the product or the company structure.
Apparently, a lot of small businesses do not respond well to this particular situation. Instead of addressing and resolving it, they ignore it.
It only makes things worse than they were before, affecting the very core efficiency and conviction of your staff members.
How To Deal With It?
It futher impacts their efforts towards customer satisfaction, hence becoming the factor for poor customer service.
What businesses are supposed to do here is reach out to these employees, get completely honest with them and understand the root cause of the problem.
Lack Of Knowledge In Product Or Service
Not believing in the product or service is one thing but not having enough or required knowledge about the product or service is highly unprofessional.
In fact, having customer representatives who are the ‘representatives of the company and responsible for customer relations not knowing the product itself brings the only embarrassment for the brand.
Not just it ruins the reputation but also settles the brand’s image as incompetent, unprofessional, and ‘not caring enough’ impression in the customers’ minds.
Lack Of Respect For Customers
This goes without saying that customers always need to be treated with utter respect, no matter what.
Customer service advisors communicate with customers all day long, and they tend to slip sometimes and become distracted from what they ought to do.
It also can be their frustration or some kind of emotion that they projected in their work.
Either way, it is extremely unprofessional and, not to mention totally disastrous for the branding or the reputation of the company.
How much the representatives pay attention to the customers also allows them to determine and often judge lack of respect or disrespect.
How To Deal With It?
So the best foot forward in such cases may be to reduce or control the exposure to a minimum.
Another way to really not exhaust your employees and avoid such instances is to give them occasional and required breaks.
They will be able to recharge their batteries, get refreshed and become more productive and focused for a long time.
Lack Of Autonomy Given To Customer Service
One of the reasons for poor customer service also can be the feeling of powerlessness in your staff members due to lack of autonomy.
When they are not given enough power and jurisdiction to make decisions of their own, it leaves them very little room to offer to customers.
This has been seen happening to plenty of known eCommerce brands and corporates as well.
Customer service staff want to help customers, make a difference and resolve their problems but for that, they don’t have the authority to even move a needle.
It becomes extremely tedious and frustrating when they are not able to make a decision on the spot as their hands are tied.
It also develops a dissatisfaction towards the company and eventually a lack of loyalty as well.
How To Deal With It?
So for companies, it is crucial that you give your frontline workers the authority to act and resolve problems.
The best strategy is to adjust your customer service protocols and even create exceptions for extreme or unique situations.
Allow them to do problem-solving on the basis of their own wit and resource management.
It also makes them feel important and a crucial part of the company, encouraging them to work even harder.
What To Avoid To Prevent Poor Customer Service?
You can certainly deal with poor customer service, but the best approach has to be just to prevent or avoid it in the first place.
So here are things you can do to avoid to prevent poor customer service in your company.
Ignored Customer Service Requests
One of the grave mistakes done by companies is completely ignoring customer service requests.
It is actually the worst customer service mistake that a business can make.
According to the Customer Service Benchmark Report, 62% of organizations do not respond to customer service requests.
Even 90% more do not inform or acknowledge to the customer that their request has been received.
This is like digging a grave for your company’s reputation and branding in the long run.
Not to surprise, if it is one of the reasons why most companies do not excel or achieve success as they expect.
Long Waiting Time
Waiting in any sense for customers, whether putting a hold on the phone or waiting for that email reply, is a nightmare.
Especially when they are in trouble, and need immediate tech assistance or customer support.
According to the Genesys State of Customer Experience Research, almost half of customers are only willing to wait on hold between 1 to 3 minutes.
30% of them can wait between 3 to 5 minutes, and a very less percentage of them will wait over 5 minutes.
So to really optimize your customer experience and prevent poor customer service, the best thing you can do is reduce the waiting time to the lowest possible.
Lack Of Etiquette & Behaviour Issue
This is certainly one of the factors for poor customer service, where negative interactions highlight the brand’s reputation.
A negative interaction can come from the bad behavior of customer service, some bad manners, or a lack of respect for the customer.
It also can be a friendly and non-cordial attitude that leads the customer to believe it was a poor experience with the brand.
Customers feeling the customer service is rude or unhelpful is the most irritating and plays a crucial part in driving poor customer experience.
So make sure you train your customer service to be polite, helpful, patient, respectable and have other techniques to charm them.
Poor Knowledge
According to Microsoft, they conducted a study in which they found that the most frustrating thing for consumers is the lack of knowledge in their customer assistance.
When they find the customer service or the interacting employee lacks conviction in what he or she is selling or proposing, it is really irritating to continue.
This is certainly one of the things you can optimize to prevent poor customer service at your company.
Inability To Resolve The Issue
The whole point of customer assistance or services is to resolve the issues of the customer when they need it.
So if the customer is not getting their issue resolved at the first time of the contactor is not able to do it at all, it becomes a major pain point for customers.
62% of respondents have to go through multiple attempts of interacting with customer service to get their issue resolved.
It is one of the ten most serious problems of customers regarding the customer service of a company.
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“Business, marketing, and Branding – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of Burban Branding and Media, and a self-taught marketer with 10 years of experience. My passion lies in helping startups enhance their business through marketing, Branding, leadership, and finance. I am on a mission to assist businesses in achieving their goals.”