The bad scenario happens when your customer service team lets customers slip out of their finger tips and go forever into the Bermuda Triangle, never come back. With or without noticing it, you need to take actions immediately.
There are 3 red signs when customers are reaching the dangerous disappear-zone. You’ll have to keep an eye closely on your team performance to know when it needs a lift and read these signs before letting customers go away.
1. Your customer support reps don’t fulfill their work
Though you may think that you have gathered qualified members to shape up your super hero customer service team, there are agents who under-perform at work. If lucky, they will self-notice about their performance and improve without having you to put a warning gun behind their back. However, there are also agents who never think of fulfilling his job.
These members might still be good people, but their problem is that they can’t deliver expected good outcome for your customer service team. So how do you know who these members are and fix/get rid of them?
First thing to identify a never-be-an-up-to-snuff customer support member is that he always makes excuses for what he is unable to do. He never sees his mistake – if there is mistake, it’s because of something else or someone else. Customers get angry? Not his fault. It’s because the product itself sucks. Or it’s because the customer is re-transferred from other agent to him – which made this customer mad. Or it will be your fault for not providing good-enough tools to deal with customers.
This kind of customer service agent doesn’t care about delivering satisfaction for customers, but only focuses on how to close the case as soon as possible so he can move on with another one.
Along with members who tend to put the blame on others, there are members who accept that it was their mistake (or their faults are brought to light so they can’t deny it) and promise to change but never take any action.
What should you do with these kinds of support reps who lack self-motivation? Just open the door and send them go. Why waste time on those who aren’t willing to spend effort on their own job?
It’s very important to hire competent agents, train them regularly and consistently improve your customer support team. At the same time, it’s also essential to get rid of sub-par agents before their bad performance harms your relationship with customers.
2. The support system you’re running isn’t effective
Beside the matter of qualifying customer service team members, you need to pay attention to the tools used for customer service too. Is it time to invest into a better tool? How do you know the current tool your team working with isn’t effective enough?
It’s when the volumes of customer’s requests increase and your staff is overloaded with dealing all of them. This problem leads to the slow response time for each support query, cause the distrust and frustration in customers themselves. Plus, the support agents gradually find it confusing to filter and prioritize the unresolved requests. They even can’t find an easy way to access the support database as well as previous interactions with customers.
For customers, they can’t find different channels to contact your support agents except for direct phone call or live chat. Plus, when they want to self-explore the solution for their problem, they can’t find a knowledge base on your eCommerce site which allows them to do so.
And there are many more stumbles on the way that make your team and customers scream in vain.
So if you are sensitive enough, you’ll realize when it’s buzzing and there’s a flashing red light warning about an unresponsive customer support system. Read the data of each period and compare them to see if you’re growing bigger and the old technology can’t perform as well as it did before. That’s time to change!
Sit down together with your team and figure out the gaps. If it’s due to the way your customer service staff is operating, then build another better strategy. If it’s due to the helpdesk tool you’re using, find a more advanced one as an alternative.
3. Loyal customers leave you
The loss of long-term customers is an undeniable sign of a really bad customer service. You were successful with winning the trust of customers, but now you have to see them walking away and shop from other competitors. The problem mostly lies in the service they have received from you.
Plus, going hand in hand with the decrease in loyal customers is the fewer referrals to your brands. That means, there is under-expected customer satisfaction when they buy from you. A business which is doing well always has delighted customers who sell for it. So if there’s less customers talking good about you, it means your service is stuck.
Pay attention to the numbers of returning customers as well as feedbacks about your business. It the numbers have been flying down over time, examine the reasons of it. Is it due to how you treat your existing customers? Does your customer service team misread customer’s behavior and misunderstand what they need your company to improve? Did you miss any customer loyalty program?
Work hard and make sure you get the answers for all these headaches.
4. Don’t panic!
It’s not too late to fix things up so your customer service will run smoothly again. Customer service always has its trickiest part to manage. You just need to stay awake and sustain a high level of customer service. Watch those 3 warnings and take action; you’ll still be able to wow customers with an excellent service.
I do hope that this article is useful for you. Don’t forget to let us know what you think about these 3 warnings mentioned above!
