How to provide great customer service? I’m sure you too must’ve tried to google it and believe our sincere efforts of the past years are also helping you in transforming your thinking and consequently, your business in creating an intuitive & positive customer experience for your customers.
Since customer service takes up most of my working time, I often try to find solutions to client queries. Sometimes though, I try to frame a question to widely held wisdoms in this field. That really helps me in refreshing my thought process to discover necessary motivation that results in making small yet significant improvements in our processes.
One of those days, I attempted to find major reasons of customer dissatisfaction. The usual culprits cropped up- unfulfilled expectations in the area of product and quality. As I continued brainstorming with my team, our collective experience and beliefs, encouraged with authentic and contemporary research, uncovered a not-so-surprising cause of increasing discontent- social media.
Bad Customer Service Goes Viral Fast
The golden maxim about customer service – a satisfied customer MAY share his good experience with one person but a disappointed one will ensure he shares it with ten- has taken the form of a many-headed monster in today’s age where social media is fast turning into a graveyard of criticisms, complaints and protests.
Why just ten, people share the ‘pathetic’ experience on multiple platforms to ‘teach the company a lesson.’ The manner in which they blindly use the word pathetic, without an iota of concern for the business’s reputation, forces me to accept that hyper-sensitivity has become the norm in our society.
While businesses around the world are struggling to find a way out of this catastrophe situation where one misstep reaches millions and gives their competitors a convenient defense to fuel the fire; small businesses are more at risk due to their size, finances and reluctance to fight every troll.
As a small business owner, I completely understand their dilemma. We’ve to abandon many legitimate fights due to lack of resources and more importantly, due to the fear of losing focus on building the business.
Trust me, we’ve to change. And transform rapidly. While apologizing for mistakes is the first mandatory step, it’s imperative to give your side of the story too. The young ones are using the social media very powerfully; you’ve to match them and topple the negative communicators. You can have 10 positive reviews and 1 negative review. If you don’t respond to that negative one, the negative review will be shared like wildfire, thus negating the effect of positive reviews.
Once you get in the habit of answering negative reviews at the first available opportunity, trust me, the trolls will disappear faster than you can spell surprise! Confront them, ask them the real cause for their frustration, and clarify your position. In almost 90% of the cases, the will themselves remove the negative comments. In the rare event of them being non-committal, you will have the vital advantage of offering solutions but nobody taking it, which makes the complainant’s motivation suspicious even in the eyes of their friends and followers.
Do you have a history of weird customer grievances? We’re eager to hear!
Open Mind Services Limited , a specialized Inbound Communications company continues to assist its clients in providing impressive customer service and delivering vital competitive advantage for more than 15 years now.
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