Have you ever had the delightful experience of dealing with an unhappy customer? If you have, then you know it’s not an easy or exciting task. But just because it’s not the most exciting aspect of marketing doesn’t mean that it’s not as important. Here we’ll try to explain the basics of improving your relationships with customers via customer service of proper quality. It is based on the recent research that we’ve conducted for one of our projects.
First, you need to realize that the best way for a company to achieve its goals is to satisfy customer needs. However, instead of viewing customer complaints as an opportunity to do exactly that, companies often perceive them as a negative sign of performance. As a result, they base their incentives on low customer complaint rates, believing that a reduction in the number of complaints means an increase in customer satisfaction.
A great way to motivate employees is to recognize those that have gone above and beyond by highlighting their efforts in internal memos, newsletters, e-mails and more. This serves two purposes. It demonstrates what constitutes exceptional customer service and motivates other employees to have their efforts featured.
Most companies deprive customer service agents of the resources they need to implement effective service recovery policies and procedures. Perhaps this is because companies fear that representatives will blindly hand out freebies to appease frustrated customers–which can quickly become expensive. However, with the right training, any employee will be able to diffuse an upset customer’s frustrations in a way that’s also satisfactory for the company.
After a company understands that dealing with customer complaints properly allows to create a strong bond with customers by turning negative brand experiences into positive ones, dealing with complaints will become a lot easier. The company will improve its customer retention, become more efficient at serving all consumers, and may even see a growth in sales through positive word of mouth. With all of these benefits, there’s no reason not to implement procedures that increase the quality of customer service.