If there’s one thing all business owners and experts can agree on, it’s that customer service is crucial to the success of an organization. If you can offer a top level of customer service, then it generally means your customers are going to be happy and satisfied. This leads to more people returning to your business, along with more new customers inclined to show up as well. When your customer service is terrible, the opposite will happen. This begs the question; why might your customer service suck? Here are a few common reasons that will help explain this:
You don’t provide many options
Back in the day, you could probably get away with just having a customer service number for people to call. If they had issues or queries, they rang the number and got an answer. These days, you need to provide more than one contact option. Some people prefer to email companies, others like to use social media, and so on.
If you only provide one or two options, then it could mean you prevent some customers from getting in touch with you. Not just that, but they may have queries that can be solved so quickly, which means there’s no point in them ringing you up, waiting in line, and talking to a customer service advisor. It could all be done quicker if they just messaged you on Twitter, for example. By opening up your options, you can lower waiting times for some customers, deal with more issues at once, and ensure everyone has a way of contacting your business.
You have too much on your plate
I find this is a highly common reason for poor customer service in small to medium-sized businesses. It’s possible you have lots of different things to do, which means you can’t dedicate as much time to your customers as you want. Especially if you’re trying to run a business by yourself or with a handful of employees. Think about it, you need to deal with marketing, tech issues, HR, sales, and so on.
When you have so much stuff to do, and not a lot of employees to help you cover the load, then it means you’re late replying to customer queries, you can’t be there for them 24/7, and your service starts to suffer. An easy solution is to think about outsourcing some things. Find an IT support company to handle that area of your company, get a marketing agency to worry about those aspects, and so on. This frees up your workload, meaning you can dedicate more time to customer needs. Alternatively, you could outsource your customer service to a dedicated company, which means they handle it all for you!
Generally speaking, if you give your customers enough ways of getting in touch with you – and if you can guarantee you have enough time to deal with them – then your service will improve. It’s all well and good offering great products or services for people to buy, but none of that will matter if you don’t provide excellent customer service.