Learning from customer disappointment

Customer disappointment is a great business tool to understand that your service levels are not up to the mark and you need to scale up to meet customer expectations. Moving forward, you need to exceed their expectations and ensure customer delight. In fact, this is the only route to have a loyal customer base in the highly competitive atmosphere.

Accept the truth

Face the facts, first. Customer language and aggression are clear clues that things are not right with the services you are offering.

More than discussing about the lack of proper services amongst your own teams, you should make it a point to collect information from your disappointed customers. The first step is to let them know that you are aware of the limitations in your service. Acknowledge the truth about your drawbacks while communicating with the customers. Your front end customer service representatives play a significant role in accepting the truth and acknowledging it to the customers. Train your representatives about saying sorry to clients who are disappointed.

Gather all the facts about the customer interaction with the service. Analyse the drawbacks that are part of the system. More often than not, representatives blame customers for mishandling a product or service. Let your representatives know that it is mandatory for the company to communicate effectively about the usage of a product or service. Blaming a customer only adds fuel to the fire. The customer might seek the help of a competitive brand.

Provide responsibility to your employees

Going further, customer service personnel should not differentiate themselves from the company. As far as the customers are concerned, every customer service representative is a company interface for them. Hence, the representative needs to own the responsibility and accountability.

This is a fourfold process. Apart from acknowledging the truth, they need to begin working on the issue at hand. They should follow it up later rigorously until the customer gets a solution. Keep the customer informed in all these stages so that the customer is aware of the developments. There might be a paradigm shift in customer opinion about the company if the representative takes the pain to address issues. Assigning proper roles to handle customer complaints and ensuring their closure within the shortest span of time helps tackle customer problems more effectively.

Managers need to address resource issues if lesser number of representatives is a hindrance. If managers do not heed to resource issues, it might lead to discontent among the existing resources. Any training to represent the company might go in vain as the employees are highly de-motivated due to excessive workload. They might try to find ways to stay away from customer issues that require more time and effort. Finally, this will reflect in poor customer service and lack of proper customer retention mechanism in place.

Communicate the known issues

Most products or services come up with some dark spots that cannot be handled immediately. In an attempt to make the customer happy, you should not twist facts and keep the customers hopeful about features that are not available. Instead, customers appreciate if they are told the truth when they inquire about a feature that is not there in the product. Likewise, the product management team should make it a point to highlight any known issues in the documentation that comes with the product or service. Customer service representatives should also be aware of these issues and should communicate promptly to customers who need that information.

Deal with the ground reasons

It is better to have a system that tracks complaints from customers. If there are grey areas that receive maximum amount of customer complaints, managers need to work on these areas and identify the root cause behind these complaints. While it may not be possible to identify such issues in quality testing during production, it helps to take customer feedback and work on these ground reasons to improve the product or service quality.

Customers feel delighted if their problems are addressed in a newer version of the product or service. Most often, such customers contribute to the excellence of the product. Listen to your customers, acknowledge the truth and work to solve their problems – there is no better way to ensure customer satisfaction.