In the past, if a customer was upset, you lost them and maybe some of their friends who heard about it through word of mouth.
If you make a client mad nowadays, you not only lose that customer but also his 6,000 Twitter followers who watched his rant. And your company’s reputation will suffer from the public disgrace and opprobrium for quite some time.
I am not being dramatic. According to research conducted by Zendesk, 88% of consumers say that positive ratings of customer service affect their purchasing decisions.
In addition, consumers are pleased to voice their opinions and insights online. Even more so when they’re awful. Ninety-five percent of consumers will tell others about a negative interaction with customer service.
Brands need to beef up their social media support as customers are increasingly likely to talk about their shopping experiences online.
Customers will always find a way to vent their frustrations online. You can improve your ability to handle such situations, though.
Have some kind of system in place to track down these concerns
When people discuss about your firm on Twitter, just 30.72 percent of them include your handle. A lot of comments and inquiries from customers will go unnoticed if you aren’t paying attention.
If you use a monitoring programme, you won’t have to manually check Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, forums, and other sites for mentions of your brand. Think of the time (and browser tabs) you’d save.
Make the feedback seriously.
It may seem obvious, yet a large number of companies don’t respond to customer feedback posted on the web. It stands to reason that alienating your clientele will have no positive effect on your retention rates.
Having to deal with them is no pleasure at all. Complaints may be daunting, and your initial reaction may be to find the smallest hiding place possible and wait for the situation to be solved by someone else. However, a prompt response to irate clients is essential. Even if there isn’t a simple answer at the moment.
“Instead of answering some complaints occasionally, when we feel like it, answer every complaint, every time,” writes Jay Baer in Hug Your Haters.
The majority of your consumers will be understanding if you can’t fix their issue right away, but they still want to know you heard them and are working on it.
Get actual people in charge of your social media pages.
Replying with canned, pre-written answers is a certain method to irritate already-irritated consumers. Or, far worse, automatons. More so if they aren’t particularly bright. Such as ASOS’s explanations:
So please, hire actual people to talk to your consumers. It will be much cheaper than attempting to win back disgruntled former consumers.
Make the most of the chance to connect with them
When a consumer makes a complaint, rather of panicking or apologising, attempt to find a way to turn it into an opportunity. Take this chance to laugh with the consumer and build rapport.
Such as David, a customer service representative at Sainsbury’s, did in his response to a tweet from customer Marty Lawrence.
If required, we may continue our conversation in private.
If the problem is technological or the consumer has many complaints, it may take more than 140 characters to address them all on social media. The situation gets much worse if the consumer keeps the discussion running, filling your Twitter feed with angry @replies.
Understandably, there are times when a topic is better served in private than on a public forum.
Develop a streamlined method of query transmission 6.
- When we phone the customer service line, we describe the issue, we are placed on wait, we are transferred to a different person, and we start from square one. She tells us to wait, and we really hope that this time we won’t be transferred.
- And now 35 minutes of our life are gone forever.
- In the online world, nothing has changed. They don’t care whether you’re the social media manager for your company and not the customer service department when people tweet to you about a problem.
- Don’t send the client to a different group if the issue isn’t something they can handle. Instead, you should have your internal team interact with one another before having the other team contact the consumer.
- The phrase “Hi, I’m John from tech support” is not something that customers want to hear. parcareWhenThFromValValForValVal Value When “How “How ” “”””””!””””” ” – 5, 3,=” A simple “Hi, I’m John from tech support” will do. A coworker briefed me about your predicament, and I’ll do all I can to help.
- Worse than not obtaining assistance is having to explain your predicament again to individuals from the same organisation.
Spend money on retaining loyal customers.
Customers today expect to receive social support as standard. And if you care about keeping your clientele, you’d best get good at it.
Putting your social network to the test is a terrific method to gauge its value to you. Try becoming your consumer for a day by posting a complaint on social media. Examine how quick and useful the response is once you do receive it. That’s the quickest approach to improve your customer service by learning from your mistakes. There will be fewer surprises when an actual consumer complaint arrives if you test it thoroughly.
You may want to learn more about how to improve your customer service. Get the complete guide on client retention right here!