Customer Service Mistakes That You Should Avoid
While many companies base their success on customer service, they may still identify remarkable differences between what they deliver and how their customers perceive it. Customer service mistakes do happen and the outcomes, sometimes, may not reveal the true reasons. Here are a few common customer service mistakes that companies often commit, causing a negative impact on the bottom line:
- Cutting Down Expenses When Sales Fall: When sales fall, many companies resort to a cost management process, which often impacts their reputation in an adverse way. This may include denial to accept credit cards to avoid processing fees, reducing the number of employees, and turning off lights during daytime to reduce utility bills. When clients are denied their right to use any kind of payment method, they are most likely to stop doing business with you. When you reduce staff, you promote longer wait times and when you choose to keep your store’s lights turned off, you create a cold, unwelcoming environment for your clients.
- Demonstrating Biased Behavior With Regular Customers: Some customer support executives prefer to offer better service to their regular customers compared to the first-timers. Preferential treatment sends out a negative signal to those who visit the store for the first time or less frequently and there are chances that those customers will never visit your store again. You have to make sure that you treat your new customers as well as you treat your existing customers in order to keep growing.
- Selling Customers Only What They Want: When a customer wants to buy a certain product, inexperienced salespersons will simply give them whatever they want or they will decline the request if the product is unavailable. Keeping your customers well-informed about the alternatives or options they have is an essential component of good customer service. If salespersons do not allow their customers to know about other products that they have, then they end up basing their store’s success on what their customers want and not on what they can offer.
- Trying To Close A Sale Immediately: Salespersons who follow traditional sales techniques adopt hasty approaches to close a sale. They may ask too many questions which may bring the client to a defensive mode. They may even give the customers limited choices which may prevent them from making a considerable investment on products that they would have taken real interest on.
All these boil down to one single point- you have to adopt an attention-to-detail approach and focus on your customers/ prospects in order to make your customer service really work and deliver desirable outcomes.
