No retailer or service provider can afford to neglect the importance of a positive customer experience. Good customer experience leaves customers feeling appreciated. But on the other hand, a lack of customer service can significantly affect a company's retention rates, driving potential consumers away. The lack of customer service costs businesses over USD 60-billion per year. Do not worry! This article is all about bad customer service examples and how to improve them.
Poor customer service occurs when a company fails to meet customer expectations and needs regarding product or service quality or response time.
Every business must establish its contact center on a foundation of exceptional customer service to ensure that employees function at their best.
Providing an introductory training session on the first days of their employment and expecting them to give good service in the years ahead could cost a lot of energy and money!
It is helpful to watch the employees' performance, identify any potential issues, and help them find a solution.
Here are some of the consequences of poor customer service:
Customer experience has eclipsed price and product as the essential brand differentiator in recent years.
The customer experience is still a deciding factor for many customers. However, businesses need to understand the impact of lack of customer service on their entire brand.
In the following comes some bad customer service examples and the solutions to make them right.
Any business may be proud of its committed service staff. Without a competent workforce, some bad customer service examples can be developed.
If your business ignores this problem, it may be unable to give proactive assistance, resulting in the loss of loyal customers, a tarnished image, and increasing customer complaints.
When hiring new customer service employees, follow these guidelines:
When companies are challenging to reach, customers typically give up trying to get help and never obtain it.
It would help if you made it simple for your customers to access the information they need to create an exceptional customer service experience regardless of the channel they use.
Customers connect with support employees through new conversational channels, including chatbots, live chat solutions like Scorebuddyqa, and messaging apps, rather than just phone and email.
You may provide more excellent service by being on the channels that your clients use to connect with their friends and family.
Being handed from one agent to the next is one of the most prevalent bad customer service examples in this industry.
It means that your staff cannot deal with a problem, but it also says that your entire organization has to be improved.
When a customer has a specific problem, whether a complex technological issue or something more fundamental, you should have specialized agents in that field.
Rather than forwarding the call and hoping for the best, the other person would know who to refer them to.
It is one of the most common bad customer service examples ever, even the most upbeat caller gets upset when you put them on hold for several minutes.
It is crucial to cut down on your wait times as feasible. You can also add your customer service variables and determine the average customer wait time using a contact center solution.
You may create a contact center KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the team's performance. This way, you will know if callers are waiting too long on hold with custom quality assurance scorecards.
If you do not have enough personnel to handle all of your calls, consider implementing a callback strategy, whereby agents contact customers as soon as they become available.
It takes more than just utilizing the right tone and words to have an excellent customer service attitude.
Your customers want to believe that your personnel knows the answers to all their problems, even if they do not.
Customers greeted by support representatives who have no idea how to help them are unlikely to be impressed, and they are likely to lose faith in your entire service.
Customer service representatives must be trained to keep a positive attitude and deal with obstacles with a can-do attitude to lessen the likelihood of callers' poor experience.
Providing the exact personal information, describing the nature of your problem, or doing anything else multiple times lacks customer service skills.
Agents should be able to access information about an existing customer or collect information from first-time callers swiftly.
It should remain available on their screen and be quick to scan during conversations, removing the need for them to ask the same questions repeatedly.
Customers want a representative to be on their side and apologize on behalf of the company when something goes wrong.
If a customer service representative cannot relate to the customer and offers no emotional contact, the client may assume there is no admission of blame or genuine remorse.
They may become irritated by hanging up or submitting a complaint due to this unpleasant situation.
There are good days and bad days for everyone. However, there will be times when every customer support representative cannot stomach speaking with another client.
Even when clients are hurling personal insults at them, you must guarantee that they remain professional and courteous during each conversation.
The idea is to find the quickest solution to the caller's problem while keeping in mind that you do not have to be upset in response.
Many unpleasant customer experiences may be traced back to a company that is delighted to make money from a transaction but unwilling to assume responsibility when things go wrong.
Concentrate on the customer's perspective. Customers should not be concerned about the financial dealings behind closed doors. If you sell them something, you are responsible for their experience.
Teach your customer service employees how to express remorse. Shifting blame does not fix the problem and creates a negative image of the customer.
Sticking rigidly to policies, even when they make no sense given the circumstances, is a classic customer service failure. When dealing with larger organizations, this is very typical.
For example, Whirlpool has judged that a microwave that needed five repairs in six months was not defective enough to warrant replacement! Instead, they procrastinated until they were.
Every customer has an idea of what privacy is. Some consumers are prepared to share more details, while others prefer to keep their personal information private.
While learning more about your target audience is advantageous, marketers must verify that their customers are comfortable sharing personal information.
The first step toward increasing customer loyalty is to gain the trust of your customers.
A prominent example of corporations compromising their customers' privacy is the vocalization of a declined credit card.
When a credit card is not accepted, cashiers and clerks scream, "Your credit card is rejected," loudly enough for the entire store to hear!
It can be highly aggravating for a customer who is ignorant of the credit card's status and is fully capable of paying for their purchases.
Even if the customer has another credit card, an outburst like this may discourage them from returning to the same store.
This situation frequently arises in retail and foodservice sectors, and approaching it as a customer care agent is always tricky.
When this happens, agents must maintain their composure and avoid calling other customers' attention to the problem.
To avoid making assumptions or passing judgments, customer support employees should be careful of their sentences.
An example of a lack of customer service is using "Your order has been canceled" instead of "Your order does not appear to be getting through."
In this scenario, after a few tries, the customer will most likely quit the line and goes to your rival business.
Contact centers are increasingly referring customers to the company's website rather than providing their requested assistance.
Most likely, a customer has already attempted to use the website but has been unsuccessful in obtaining the information they seek.
Your callers do not want to be advised to hang up and resolve the issue independently.
You want to answer as many calls as possible, and your FAQ section could include the solution to the caller's issue. They did ask for a reason, which your staff must respond to.
Your scorecards can easily show you which agents attempt to refer clients to the website to speed up calls and assist you in avoiding mistakes that result in bad customer service. In this case, for example, Scorebuddy can help you a lot with its scorecard feature, which will replace spreadsheets that adapt to your business needs.
Lack of customer service makes customers unsatisfied with businesses, hurts the brand image, and harms profitability. This article provided some bad customer service examples to help your business learn from them and grow.
