No matter how great your products or services are, some customers are bound to run into problems. But by providing excellent customer service, you can prevent unhappy customers from leaving. Interactions with your customer service team can make all the difference in how unhappy customers feel about your company. A negative interaction could lead them to never use your company again, while a positive one could turn them into a loyal customer. In this article, we’ll discuss how your customer service team can create positive experiences that prevent frustrated customers from leaving.
What causes customer dissatisfaction?
To keep your customers satisfied, it’s important to understand what can cause frustration and unhappiness. Some common reasons for customer dissatisfaction include:
- Poor experiences
- Long wait times on hold
- Defective products
- Technical issues
- Poor customer service
- Unavailability of products
This is not an exhaustive list of potential causes of customer dissatisfaction. Examining past customer complaints and feedback can help you identify unique concerns specific to your business.
How to deal with unhappy customers?
To win back unhappy customers, it’s essential to provide excellent customer service. Here are seven tips to help your customer service team successfully handle unhappy customers:
- Be empathetic: Empathy is crucial for understanding where a customer is coming from and for taking the conversation forward appropriately. For busy customer service teams, it can be tempting to jump to a solution as quickly as possible. However, this can lead to rushing the customer through an explanation of their problem, which can be ineffective. Instead, try to understand the customer’s perspective fully and make them feel heard before offering a solution. Then, prioritize helping the customer meet their needs over simply providing the right answer.
- Practice active listening: Active listening involves making small verbal and non-verbal acknowledgments throughout the conversation to show that you’re paying attention to the customer’s issue. By actively listening, you can allow the customer to vent while demonstrating that you’re listening closely to their concerns. Without asking leading questions, you may be able to gather enough information to offer a solution. Active listening can also help calm an angry customer and arrive at a solution more quickly.
- Apologize for mistakes: Many customers contact a company with simple questions or to clarify a feature or policy. However, some customers reach out because the company made an error. In these cases, it’s essential to admit the error and offer a sincere apology. Whether the mistake was a shipping error, incorrect information on your website, or something else, acknowledging the mistake is crucial. Then, reassure the customer that you’ll take steps to fix the error, so they can continue to purchase from or work with your company with confidence.
- Provide fast responses and resolutions: Long wait times or being put on hold can further frustrate unhappy customers. In fact, a delay of just 12 hours in response can lead to a 9.6% drop in CSAT (customer satisfaction). Whether it’s responding to a message or offering a solution, it’s important to ensure that you’re providing fast service. Investing in customer service can help you deliver timely responses and resolutions. Set up SLAs for responses and resolutions, improve internal collaboration for faster answers, and gather customer context quickly by integrating various customer support channels and applications.
- Go above and beyond to satisfy the customer: When a customer is unhappy, it’s important to go above and beyond to resolve their issue and make them satisfied. This might involve offering a discount, a replacement product, or some other form of compensation. By showing that you’re willing to go the extra mile to make the customer happy, you can turn a negative experience into a positive one and potentially recapture the dissatisfied customer.
