Customer service is at the forefront of any good business model.
If your customers aren’t leaving your establishment happy, there are few chances to bring them back.
With the advent of the digital era, there has been a rise in the competition, and publicly available business reviews have made it all the more challenging for businesses to maintain a spotless profile.
In the era of Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and other reviewing platforms, a single negative review of your business has the power to drive away potential customers.
This is because people don’t ask their peers for recommendations anymore.
Providing good customer service has been the bedrock of businesses since the beginning.
However, in the pre-internet times, a bad review used to take some time going around.
This time has come down to almost zero because now any bad review from a single customer you have is visible to the whole world almost instantly.
What Can Go Wrong for a Customer?
With the high number of options customers have these days, they don’t bother to tell you what’s wrong.
It’s easier for them just to leave.
Here are a few things that can sour the experience for people:
- They have to wait very long for your service.
- Their prior issues or questions have gone unresolved.
- You have left too much on automation.
- Employees that have acted out of order, tarnishing your name in the process.
- A service that feels like a rehearsed script instead of being unique for every customer.
- An inability to understand what your customer wants.
While these are definitely not the only reasons for bad customer experience, these are the usual suspects.
You can think about what upsets you as a customer yourself and see that most of your unpleasant needs stem from similar sources.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer Journey Mapping has the potential to improve your rate of customer conversion greatly.
This enables the businesses to get the experience a customer has when they use their services, enabling a better understanding.
This, in turn, helps you to identify and negate any problem before it even begins.
You can benefit from it because:
- It enables you to engage with your customers directly. This leads to higher retention of customers and an increase in your revenue.
- It helps you customise your user interface to better suit your customers’ needs, making them feel valued.
- It helps you to understand customer needs and where to allocate your resources.
- It helps you to see your weak spots clearly and work on them.
- Above all, it gives you a clearer understanding of your business functions, helping you iron out your customer service.
Engaging with your current and potential customers, good delivery of your services and products, and taking care of them even after the transaction has been made are all very important stages of a customer journey map.
You should be able to truly feel what your customer feels to be able to execute this process properly.
Keeping Customers Content
While most brands believe that their customer service is better than others and customers enjoy coming to them, it is very clear that it’s not the case.
This is where engaging with your customers helps you, as you can learn from their experiences.
There is no price to customer service because you are gambling with your brand value.
You should always strive to keep improving.
You can keep visiting various review websites to see what’s wrong and what’s right with your service.
Keep an open mind while doing so because those websites can be pretty harsh.
You can also go to the websites of your competitors and see what changes they are making.
Quite often, you will learn something about the changes you should make by observing your competitors.
Whether their changes are good or bad, you get a lesson nonetheless.
You can also keep track of which sections of your websites are engaging people more, which parts are the most visited, most clicked, and which parts are causing people to go away without exploring the rest of the website.
This will give you an idea of which parts to change so that they can be more interactive and interesting.
Building trust isn’t easy, especially with customers.
You have to take the following steps:
- Becoming aware of your own shortcomings and strengths.
- Understanding the difference between what your customer needs and what you provide.
- Taking visible actions to bridge the gap between customer expectations and reality.
- The key to satisfying your customers can also be through offering incentives.
Your Approach
To have happy customers, you will have to identify what points are creating the most issues.
Apart from that, you’ll have to identify what issues are making them leave your website.
You will have to scour through a ton of data to do so. Apart from this, these metrics will also help you in quantifying certain aspects that wouldn’t have been quantifiable directly, like your brand’s image, your customers’ feelings, and key factors in their decisions.
Addressing all of these will help you prosper.
Conclusion
While marketing and advertisement are crucial even today, your customer service is what lingers longer than both of them.
It is what makes or breaks your brand, sometimes both.
Recommendations:
- Find: A list of industry consultants who can help you with customer journey mapping >
- Learn: Search our courses for customer experience, managing difficult customers and contact centres >
