Bad customer service can happen when an organization lacks
the resources or insight to handle unforeseen happenings. For example, if you
are a courier company, bad weather can upset your consignment delivery plans.
In this case, do not expect your consumers to understand your predicament. They
will want the best service no matter what.
Customer care and
its impact on brand reputation
Great customer service will build brand reputation and
customer loyalty. It will also prevent negative reviews. Review sites like
Trust Point and Review Center allow angry customers to give way to their
frustration online. This can cause a great deal of damage to your reputation
and credibility.
If people are happy with the service they received, they
will probably not bother to leave a positive review. But if they are angry or
upset, they will readily leave a negative review. This explains why your
organization needs to provide excellent customer service all the time.
Bad customer service
– a case study
An independent courier company recently learned this lesson
the hard way. Due to bad weather, they couldn't deliver shipments on time, but
the company didn't bother to inform customers beforehand. Consequently,
thousands of angry customers took to the internet to voice their
dissatisfaction with the service they received. People complained that the
courier company's tracking system was not working properly and that they had
not received their consignments even after waiting for weeks.
Many people felt that publishing a negative review online
was the only way to invite attention to their problem because speaking to a
customer care executive or receiving a reply via email was simply impossible -
the company had no dedicated customer care team. In the end, the company's
sales and marketing manager had to make personal calls to angry customers to
ease the situation.
The courier company landed itself in a soup because it had
not anticipated the problems. Worse still, it had never really understood the need
to have a dedicated customer care division. The company did have a small team
of agents, but they only catered to its clients who were mainly retailers. The
end-user was nowhere in the picture. So when problems arose and people started
complaining there was no one to listen to them.
An important lesson that all organizations should learn
from this incident is that everyone who wears the company badge has a
responsibility to provide customer service when the situation demands it.
Multi-channel
contact
Ideally, your customer support should incorporate
multi-channel contact. People should be able to contact you via multiple
channels. If they can't reach your agent via telephone, they should be able to
reach them via email.
Social media is also a great platform to provide customer
service. In this particular example, the company made no attempt to contact its
customers or the recipients of the shipments. Retailers promised their
customers that their shipments would arrive on time, but when that didn't happen,
people became furious. The company should have at least provided a phone number
and an email address. This would have allowed customers to contact them. If
they had proper workforce management, their existing customer care team would
have engaged with people sooner. In addition, they could have recruited
temporary staff to meet demand.
It is true that all organizations cannot have a
full-fledged customer care division. Still, resolving issues quickly is
imperative in this age of information explosion. Coming back to the courier
company, an inability to take prompt action made them look like they just
didn’t care about their customers. They are unlikely to regain their customers'
confidence anytime soon.
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