Do you know what customers hate about customer support?

By C Care BG Comments Off

It is a known fact that the quality product is the thing, that attracts customers to your company, but what makes them stay is the good customer service. However, many companies tend to deny customer service its rightful position as the core part of any business. Furthermore, there are still companies that neglect this part totally. But no matter how good your customer service is, there are always things that can frustrate your clients. Let’s take a look at the top things customers hate when it comes to customer service:

1. Explaining the issue over and over again – most customers trust that contacting a customer service agent means almost immediate resolution of their problem. The thing is, problems come in different variations and sometimes are beyond the knowledge of the employee. The logical thing to do is to transfer the call to a representative of another department who can actually handle the issue. However, in this case the customer will have to explain the problem thoroughly again (and probably answer the same specifying questions once more). Worst case scenario is the customer being re-routed a second time. This multiple explaining aggravates every single customer, although it might not be noted. The solution is simple – if an agent should transfer the call to another department, first he/she should inform the next agent about the case and apologize to the caller for the hold, before transferring him;

2. Long hold times – as previously explained, in some cases putting the customer on hold is unavoidable. Customers hate this, because they expect a fast and working solution to their problem. But during peak hours this is almost impossible. To soften the blow, agents should inform callers about the approximate length of the hold time, and if it is longer than a minute, they should explain why and ask if the customer will wait or call again later;

3. Confusing phone menu – if we disregard the fact that just hearing automated voice when trying to reach customer service is a little bit disappointing, the giant phone menus are a little personal hell for everyone. They are hard to follow, let alone navigate, and are bad news for agents too, because by the time the callers contact a person, they are a bit more angrier than before the IVR (interactive voice response). Some even hang up before reaching an agent. To make things easier, phone menus should be as short as possible and there should always be the option to press “0” if one wants to speak to an employee directly;

4. Rude representatives – there are multiple cases of customer service agents being rude or straightforwardly hostile to a customer, causing the downfall of a company (because customers share such stories on the web). Callers expect to be treated nicely when they call with a problem or question and rudeness can turn the initially positive customer experience into a nightmare. Rudeness is the number one reason for loyal customers to switch companies. To avoid this, make sure your employees understand that their job is to help customers above all and that good attitude leads to better results. Grant them the needed rest every now and then to make sure they won’t burn out in the middle of a phone call.

Tolerating bad customer service is not a human quality and if you don’t want to find this out the hard way – recognizing and removing the problem factors as soon as possible will help a lot.