FAQs or FFAs? How Your Customer Service is Failing
It’s a customer-centered world, we’re just doing business in it.
As companies continue to join the social media trend, they are marketing themselves to thousands of customers. They are also opening the doors to unfiltered publicity. With the ability to tweet, tag, and comment on a company’s public account, customers have more power than ever when it comes to writing reviews and influencing customer retention.
Customer retention is important to the success of any business and is best improved through customer loyalty. How do we expect to keep customers loyal to our brand if there are poor reviews all over our social media channels? Many companies suffer due to negative publicity, and many of these public complaints link back to poor customer service.
According to Alyson Stone in her article “8 Customer Service Issues That Impede Loyalty” the primary driver of customer loyalty is the amount of effort it takes for your customers to resolve a problem with your company.
The harder it is for customers to get answers, the more effort they put into trying to find help. The more effort they use, the more unhappy they become with your company. The more unhappy they are, the more they want to express their dissatisfaction. This built-up anger often ending up on your company’s Facebook and Twitter pages. We are all customers of some type and understand the frustration of trying to reach customer service by calling three different numbers or being put on hold for infinity and beyond.
Instead of apologizing for complaints after the fact, why don’t we meet customer needs from the start? Instead of editing your social media accounts, start editing your customer service. Focusing on three Frequently Failed Areas of customer service, it’s clear to see a change is in order.
FFA 1: It takes too long to resolve an issue.
You cannot forget that your customers are busy too. They do not have unlimited time to talk to you about their issue, and they have more important uses of time than sitting on hold for an hour. Customers want support that is efficient and time-considerate.
FFA 2: Customers are constantly transferred and have to re-explain their issue each time.
Not only should you value your customer’s time, but you must also value their input. They are calling to address a problem, and transferring them from one unhelpful person to another is inefficient and frustrating. Each time they have to re-explain their problem to a different representative, they are losing their patience and you are losing their loyalty. Customers want to get answers as soon as possible and they do not want to waste time telling their story just to re-tell it to a different representative.
FFA 3: The FAQ section on the website is incomplete or unhelpful.
Many customers try to avoid making customer service calls by searching on your website for Customer Support or Frequently Asked Questions. To their disappointment, they often find these sections incomplete and missing the answer to their specific problem, so they end up calling anyway. Customers want help to be easily available and convenient to follow.
A solution to all three of these FFAs would change the future of customer service around the world. Lucky for your business, it has arrived and it is called Marketeer. This software uses artificial intelligence to create a knowledge base of frequently asked or previously answered questions. Marketeer uses a virtual intelligent assistant that provides 24/7 customer support, allowing customers to call anytime at their convenience. You will never put your customers on hold because there are no phone calls necessary. Marketeer is also available in different forms to reach your customers through convenient channels they already use. Whether it is through your company website, mobile app, email or Facebook Messenger your customers can easily access support at any time of day, for any reason, and receive immediate answers.
Stop losing customers due to poor support and become a leader in customer retention. Instead of worrying about poor reviews, you can promote your social media accounts and all of the great publicity that comes with them. Increase your customer loyalty, enhance your company’s future, introduce them to Marketeer.
Marketeer Hybrid AI+Human platform find the right information in an extremely fast way, using natural language processing.
You can try it clicking here
Do you want to learn more about the Fourth Industrial Revoltion? Check out our publication about Industry 4.0
Originally published at blog.marketeer.co on July 4, 2016.
