9 Key Customer Service Challenges and their Solutions
Customer satisfaction is one of the crucial metrics for measuring customer service. Having superior customer satisfaction can improve your brand image and competitive advantage in the market. More than 80% of the customers complain that companies ignore their issues and feedback that create a negative impression about that brand in their mind.
Hence, identifying the root of customer issues and proactively resolving them will help you in nurturing long-term customer relationships and enhanced customer retention. Every business faces problems in meeting customer satisfaction, and it is important how much they are putting effort into solving those issues. In this blog, we are going to point out a few customer service challenges faced by the organizations and their relevant solutions.
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9 Key Customer Service Challenges:
Compared to your product portfolio, customers always remember the way your brand is treating them. If you have made any customer service mistakes also, the main part is how you are handling the mistake and offering relevant solutions to the consumer. Below is the list of common customer service challenges along with the probable solutions which can help you in providing a great customer experience.
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Slower Response Time
No customers want to wait on hold for a longer time. Customers tend to switch to a different brand if they do not get faster customer support after reaching. Many customers do not pay attention to offering a faster customer response time which leads to a loss of customers and a negative brand image. Furthermore, they will spread negative word of mouth about that brand to their friends and family.
To improve your customer response time, you can deploy AI-enabled chatbots, add live chat or have enough support representatives for managing customer responses. However, chatbots and live chat services are the most preferred ones that companies are using for responding real-time responses to customers’ pings within seconds.
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Insufficient Customer Engagement
Though companies use chatbots and live chat services for offering instant responses, they experience customer dissatisfaction a lot. The reason behind this is the excessive use of automation. You have to understand the severity of the problem and understand what the customer wants. For troubleshooting any problem or if the customer wants to talk with a support representative, you need to immediately transfer the call to a human agent.
Using a voice chat service or a video chat can be the best solution for providing real-time solutions to customer issues. Apart from that, collaborating with co-browsing also helps in a way that you can control their screen in real-time to solve complex problems. Thus you can deliver great customer delight.
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Excessive Automation
Automation with Artificial Intelligence is the future of a seamless customer experience. However, excessive customer service automation can lead to a bad customer experience as chatbots can’t understand every human emotion and their desire to speak with a human agent. For complicated issues like payment or refund or return request-related issues, customers prefer to speak to a real person rather than chat.
This can be solved by designing the chatbots in a way that they can transfer the call to a human agent immediately when the customer wants the same. There should be an option of switching the chat to a human interaction that solves most of the problems of excessive automation. Also, you can provide alternative communication channels such as email, live chat, voice call, etc.
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Offering Wrong Solutions
Sometimes due to lengthy unclear customer interactions, customer support representatives offer irrelevant solutions or a wrong product recommendation that pisses the customers. The reason behind this is a lack of active listening and not asking proper questions to understand the nature and scope of the problem.
The one and the only way to rectify these unhealthy situations is to practice active listening and use technologies that collect insights from previous chats and conversations easily. Visitor analytics can be used to gain proper customer insights that help in offering exactly the right solutions and product recommendations.
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Poor After-Sales Support
Many businesses only focus on the sales of their products or service which means once the products are sold, it is over. They hardly bother about their customers if they are facing any kind of issue regarding product usage or any other aspects. They do not facilitate any kind of post-sale service for the customers. In these kinds of situations, customers feel left out and tend to switch to a different brand having better customer service.
Having a proper customer support team while making regular follow-ups of the customers will help you to understand their issues and their expectations of your brand. However, a personalized thank you note filled with gratitude will help in strengthening the customer relationship and customer delight.
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Incompetent Support Staff
Customers look for companies that maintain transparency about their products and services. A lack of trained support agents can ruin the brand’s reputation as they will not handle the complex customer problems like billing issues, clarity of specifications, timeliness of solution delivery, etc. This kind of customer service problem can create a bad experience in the minds of customers which will lead to negative word of mouth.
Constant product training and monitoring the customer interactions daily help in improving the brand image. However, creating a comprehensive FAQ page will help the agents to refer those to the customers when in need.
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Frequent Call Transferring
Frequent transfer of customer calls is a sign of poor customer service that leads to customer dissatisfaction. These kinds of customer support mistakes usually happen when business workflows are not aligned with the communication channels. Also, when the customer support agents are not competent or are too busy to handle larger volumes of voice calls, then frequent call transferring happens.
To fix these kinds of customer service problems, implementing intelligent routing can be used that will reduce the number of touchpoints and route calls efficiently. Effective call center department management can help in the effective distribution of calls to the right department while improving the customer response time.
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Fail to Meet Customer Expectations
Usually, companies make false commitments to their customers and create customer expectations that they sometimes fail to meet. Failure in meeting commitments will lead to a bad customer experience. It is always advisable not to make any promises that you will not be able to meet.
Having a proper follow-up plan and maintaining regular communication can help in handling these unfortunate situations. Companies must be clear about the things they want to provide to their customers rather than making false promises. Apart from that, going the extra mile for customer delight and sending a token of care.
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Lack of Omnichannel Presence
Omnichannel marketing strategy has been the latest customer service trend that has been helping many companies to offer better customer support. Companies that do not have an Omnichannel strategy in their customer support fail to keep up with their communication channels. Often they are not able to gather information about the same customer if he pings using a different communication channel which leads to a bad impression of the brand.
However, Omnichannel technology helps the brand in managing all the communication channels on time and getting the proper customer insights whenever needed. Needless to say, in this generation customer support without Omnichannel support will not be able to offer a good customer delight.
Conclusion
It is needless to say that customer service problems are inevitable and they will keep coming continuously. However, you cannot avoid customer issues rather following best practices of customer support will help you in improving brand image and gaining more customer base. A well-crafted crisis management plan will help in resolving these challenges.
Outsourcing customer support services is one of the good options that will not only improve your customer experience but also you can focus on your core business functions. Trupp Global is a reputed outsourcing agency known for its cost-effective customer support strategies for its clients based on their business requirements. Trupp Global strives to use the latest technologies of customer service and its Omnichannel support helps to improve the customer experience to the next level.