“Moments of truth tell the tale of success or failure. Every contact with the customer creates a lasting impression – for better or worse. Handle each opportunity with care.” – Bill Quiseng
Some companies do a better job at creating and building robust relationships with their customers. This is what makes for service excellence, and keeps customers with a company. As mentioned earlier, focusing on providing top class experiences and making customers successful are critical if companies wish to remain successful. Happy customers insure the success of a company through sustainable growth. For several companies today still their customer service is not working despite all the benefits of keeping customers happy. This effectively means that these companies do not see or realize the benefits of robust strategies to ensure top class customer support, and neither do they know when their support teams are struggling and failing. By the time, such companies realize that something is wrong with their customer support they would find themselves dealing with angry and even vengeful customers.
It is not possible to know in advance if a company’s customer service is not working unless it is being monitored constantly. Since customers now are in control, it has become even more imperative for companies to ensure that they provide top class experiences and service to their customers or risk losing them to any of the many competitors in the market. However, before making any improvements, it is necessary for a company to accept that its customer service is not working – constantly denying it or placing blame will not help. In this time when customer service has become the major differentiator in a market overwhelmed by similar products and services, companies must awaken to the fact that business would be sustainable only by completely changing and enhancing customer experiences and support. Customers stay happy and become loyal when they can perceive genuine effort on the part of a company to help them and make them successful. Does your company know that its customer service is not working? What would be the signs indicating a breakdown in customer support?
While customer satisfaction is no longer a measure of customer happiness or loyalty, it certainly is worth measuring to know whether your company’s customer service is not working or not, and yet some companies fail at monitoring this critical aspect. In order monitor customer satisfaction companies must get into the habit of asking customers directly for their feedback. For instance, a good time to ascertain whether your customer service is not working or not, would be immediately after a customer would have indicated a problem, and your company would have worked to resolve it. Your customer’s response would help you know whether your company’s customer support is working as efficiently as necessary. Of course, this is not an adequate method, since such feedback would only happen when customers contact the company with a problem, and would leave out all the others who may remain silent despite a problem. To gain feedback on whether customer service is not working, from the complete customer base, companies must periodically send out feedback surveys with pertinent questions around customer support standards. If long-term cumulative results indicates a dip in customer satisfaction, your company can be sure, that customer service is not working and something would need to be done instantly.
As mentioned, a larger portion of customers remains silent despite instances of inefficiencies, leading companies to believe that they are doing a fine job on the service front. However, in order to rule out that customer service is not working, companies must look at metrics such as number of calls to their customer support teams, number of tickets for various issues, the amount of time taken to resolve one query, number of first call resolutions, and other such metrics. These are real-time indicators of customer satisfaction levels, and any significant negative trends, which would make it easier for a company to remove any gaps.
If your customer service is not working, over time your company would experience a sharp increase in employee turnover, and a drastic decrease in the overall morale and energy levels of the remaining employees. Customer service is a high-pressure job and without regular training, proper tools, and updated technology, this job would become even harder. A hard job that becomes nearly impossible to manage is sure to leave employees disheartened forcing them to look for jobs in other companies. As employees begin to leave in droves, a company would become unstable, affecting the service and quality of products for customers. As customers begin to perceive such confusion, they are sure to leave and associate with an organized and stable company that cares for its employees.
If the above, were not strong enough indicators that your customer service is not working, then maybe the resultant loss in revenue and profits would make a company take notice. Customers that leave would provide negative feedback and share their poor experiences with others, leading to either more customer churn or a reduction in the business provided by existing customers. In addition, customers would refrain from providing testimonials and would be hesitant in providing leads and referrals too. All these factors together would ultimately lead to the downfall of a company. What is shocking is that loss of revenue is the last thing to happen before a company’s downfall, and yet companies fail to see the signs and indicators clearly showing that customer service is not working and soon they would fail.
A company should know that its customer service is not working as soon as a customer needs to connect to know how to use a product or service. While this may not seem like such a glaring problem, the fact is that a company should have ensured that the customer understood everything about the product or service such that the customer would have been able to use it without any difficulty. Too many such instances, lead customers to believe that the company does not know its own offerings, or that its service is inefficient. By getting to the root cause of why customers have issues, a company would be able to resolve proactively any future issues. In addition, customers would not need to call repeatedly to resolve their issues.
You can be sure that your customer service is not working or will stop working at some point if your company does not provide opportunities for training and development of its customer service staff. Dealing with customers brings challenges of all shapes and sizes, and unless the service personnel are ‘armed’ with knowledge, skills, and technology, it would be impossible to keep customers happy or even satisfied for too long. When customers become irate, they are prone to vent on the customer service agents, which in turn would lead to lowered morale and anger in the service staff. Angry and downbeat employees cannot provide service excellence – it all becomes one large vicious cycle that ultimately ruins a company.
If your customer service is not working, your company can be sure that this would be written about, and publicized on every possible online channel by frustrated customers. Despite the critical nature of efficient customer service, several companies continue to ignore it or consistently falter. Companies that do care about the kind of customer service they provide, are the ones that are successful today since they would have the support and loyalty of their customers. The harsh reality is that loyalty is not easy to come by, and neither is it guaranteed, especially if you are a company that does not support its customers. Customers have myriad options today, and they do not hesitate to take their business to a company that would provide them with the very best, most importantly top class service.
