What is a common mistake in customer service?

Customer service mistakes can be hazardous as they cause a negative customer experience and impacts your success. Here are the widespread customer service mistakes and ideas for troubleshooting them. 

What can cause customer service mistakes?

#1 Not providing adequate training for your agents

If your customer support rep can’t ask the right question: to understand customers’ needs, resolve issues on time, or do adequate work with a ticketing system or help desk, it is your failure too.

Solution

Provide training sessions to your support team. It will help them to improve their weak spots and avoid any customer service issues in the future. 

#2 Not being proactive with your customers

Taking a reactive approach to fix customer problems is a typical mistake that results in customer churn. 

Solution

Analyze all the workflow and reach out to the customers instead of waiting for them to contact you. Got a small support team? Then opt for a knowledge base or FAQs section and offer customers help themselves. 

#3 Not being available for the customers

Your customers live around the globe, and you have to offer 24/7 support. Thus, your team fails to cover all shifts adequately or lacks support reps for different reasons. 

Solution

Adopt the AI-powered chatbots and create a self-service portal to help your customers resolve their issues instantly.  

#4 Not listening to your customers

Ensure that you listen and hear your customers because responding irrelevant to customers’ queries hurts the company’s reputation. 

Solution

Train your support reps the active listening techniques. Adopt help desk systems so they can check the interaction history to know the context of the customer story. Collect the Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT) to get feedback on the quality of your service.

#5 Not delivering what you promise

Overpromise and underdeliver the services or product features. That happens when your support reps don’t know how your product or service works.

Solution

Promise only what you can deliver. Product support is essential, so you should improve the collaboration inside your company. Your support and sales managers should know what the new features are and how they work. 

#6 Not providing omnichannel support

Customers use various channels to communicate with companies, and you decide via what communication channels your brand can be reached. However, customers expect fast responses, and if your support team is small, you’ll get more negative feedback than profit from offering numerous support channels and round-the-clock support.

Solution

Of course, you can’t make your customers use a specific channel, but your budget for the support team should be well-thought and estimated. Consider adding self-service options like a knowledge base or a customer portal.

#7 Not analyzing your data

Forgetting about using the data you already have, including customer reviews, various surveys and feedback, and recorded calls, is a widespread mistake among heads of customer support departments. 

Solution

Analysis of the data can help you streamline your operations. For example, listening to calls can give insights on what practices best work for customer support, and surveys help you better understand what needs improvement. 

Can you leverage technology to improve customer support?

Adopt an omnichannel help desk. Itis a place for unified communication to skyrocket your customer service quality and agents’ performance, and improve customer experience and satisfaction. Also, take advantage of automating routine tasks and free up your agents to deal with more complex customer problems. Plus, the numerous triggers and rules in your help desk or ticketing system help answer quickly and solve customer queries more efficiently.

Have some more customer service mistakes on your mind? Feel free to share and discuss them together.