Running a business these days is all about giving your customers the best experience. Whether you are selling products or services, everything you do is going to affect the customer experience. This includes the support you give them and the way you market your products. This means that you need to make sure you’re always putting your customers’ needs first.
Shutterstock Licensed Photo – By fizkes
With this in mind, every time you communicate with your customers, you need to make sure you’re following a carefully planned approach. You must optimize your customer support strategy to make sure that you deliver on their needs and also give them the best experience. While the ideal method depends on your brand, there are a few key mistakes you’re going to want to avoid.
Today, we explore four of these most important communication mistakes you’re going to want to avoid when interacting with your customers.
#1 – Using a Tiered Support Service
Many support services used to be run using a tiered system, which meant that everybody started at the bottom and then worked their way up the support ranks until their problem was solved. While this reserved the best support staff for the most difficult tasks, this was time-consuming and frustrating. This is obviously not something the customers liked.
Instead, you need to implement a collaborative support system. This is where your support team can work together to provide the best experience for all customers, regardless of their problems or concerns
Application platforms like Spiro can improve your business’s sales and help to provide this collaborative support team your business needs.
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#2 – Forcing Customers Down a Channel
How can your customers currently get in touch with you? Is it by email only? This is an incredibly bad mistake because customers want the freedom to be able to get in touch with you in the easiest way for them, and failure to do so will result in them going elsewhere.
Email is fine for non-urgent requests, but what if they want help now? You need to make sure your business is offering live chat assistance, phone support, a ticket system, Messenger and WhatsApp support, or as much as you can. Social media is becoming more important for delivering customer support than ever before. You should make sure that there is a system in place to handle customer support requests on social media, because they are going to reach out to you there whether you expect it or not.
#3 – Not Listening to Your Customers
This might sound like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many businesses think they know what the customer wants and tries to help with it, only for the business to be completely wrong. Customers may not be the best communicators of their problems, but it’s up to the business to get to the heart of the problem as quickly and as effectively as possible.
This means that you need to develop a simple system to help them reach out and make their needs clear. You may want to offer them a survey when they contact support, so they don’t need to articulate their problem in their own words. This can reduce the risk of misunderstandings.
#4 – Not Being Consistent with Support
Take a look at reviews whether that’s online or via a trusted website. Review the testimonials you’ve received from your customers on their experiences with your business. Have you been consistent across the board or have some people had an amazing experience and had some people had the worst?
You need to make sure you’re consistent across the board with how you communicate to your customers, so the customers know what to expect when they’re communicating with you. Make sure everyone that engages with customers is aware of the expectations and consistently delivers on expectations.
Summary
If you’re able to avoid these mistakes, you’ll bring wondrous benefits to the way your business operates in the eyes of your customers. Communication is one of the most important areas of your brand, and if you can get it right by avoiding these mistakes, you’ll be boosting your chances for success dramatically.