The customer experience is one of the most important areas that your business should be focusing on. There are so many uncontrollable variables here, along with risks and challenges that can make or break your customer base. Customers are fickle. No matter what your business is doing or what type of brand you hold, if you’re not impressing your customers, they will swiftly move on to somebody else in the same space who can offer them what you can’t.
Understanding customer frustrations is going to be the biggest part of running your business in a way that is customer-friendly. If you’re not customer-friendly, you won’t be able to. A loyal customer base. And if you can’t build a loyal customer base, what are you doing? From an inability to process credit cards if you’re running a market stall to choosing not to offer a good range of online payment options, there are plenty of ways that businesses are frustrating their customers, and sometimes they don’t even know it. So, in this list, we’ve put together some things that are frustrating your customers and then what you could be doing to fix them.
- You are leaving them on a hold. There is a societal thirst for instant gratification these days, and whether that’s the advent of technology and the Internet or the fact that we like to watch everything in 30-second bite-sized pieces, it doesn’t really matter. People want what they want, and they want it right now. So if you have hold times that last an hour at a time for people to be able to talk to a human being. You’re going to end up being the enemy of your customers rather than someone who can help. You can fix this by ensuring that you have self-service systems that are customer centric and resolution oriented. You can also fix this by making sure that you hire enough people to take customer calls. Implementing a live chat feature can also go a very long way.
- You’re repeating yourself too much. Customers want to hear the answer to their questions. They don’t want to hear that you are sorry for their weight or that you are sorry for their treatment. They want solutions rather than repeated robotic explanations. One of the biggest, most frustrating inefficiencies in business is repetition. If a customer is calling, they don’t want to restate their information to different agents over and over again. Having a good customer management system in place to be able to take the information once and pass it along is important.
- Your business isn’t personal enough. There are so many scripts and policies in a business that it can be hard to make the customer a standout person. A business who treats the customer like a number is a business that’s going to find their customers filter off to other places that offer more personalized services. Getting to know your customers and not using constant scripts to talk to them is important. By putting personalisation in place, you can make sure that your customers feel valued.