To consistently provide high-quality customer service, it’s important to spot these factors and have the right systems and processes in place to resolve them.
We all have a long checklist on how to deliver good customer service. Businesses have come up with numerous ways to proactively prevent negative customer experience.
But apart from identifying the best practices and tips to do so, we can’t fully understand the issue without clearly knowing the factors of a negative customer experience as well. You have to look at your services on both ends.
That’s why in this article, we’re going to discuss the factors that could cause a negative customer experience.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience is composed of all the interactions and experiences your customer has with your company throughout their entire customer journey
Bad or poor customer experience occurs in a situation where business fails to address customers needs and expectations—in service, response, or resolution. Determining these factors is crucial to understand your customers’ needs.
Bad customer service can put potential business opportunities at risk. Losing customers and future business interests would cost you more than money, it would also cost your reputation.
To avoid all of these from happening, the first step would be identifying the factors that could cause a negative customer experience.
Factors that could cause negative customer experience
Did you know that more than $62 billion is lost every year due to bad customer service? While 91% of unhappy customers cut ties with the brand without any complaints or feedback.
This alarming percentage can affect your business growth and could really undermine your ability to establish long-term relationships with your clients.
So make sure to be wary of these factors we’ve listed below as they contribute to causing a negative customer experience.
Holding time
A customer’s long waiting time in your store or a long holding time via phone have conclusively shown that people get frustrated easily and it significantly affects their mood towards your interaction with them.
A study about waiting for lines models reported that businesses lost 75% of customers due to waiting times. With the advancement of technology, consumers demand faster support services. This means that you should exert your best efforts to reduce their waiting time.
You can hire more staff to handle more calls, or you can categorize requests and let experts from each department handle them. This way, your support team could accommodate customers’ issues more quickly.
Repetitive questions
When a customer reaches out for a support representative, they will explain their situation and ask a lot of questions about their problems. Then you’ll have to go through the steps of answering their questions.
But once you get to the bottom of their problem and you realize you’re not the right person to talk to, they’ll realize they’ll have to repeat the same process all over again.
Transferring their call is exhausting for the customer’s end. It is an awful example of bad customer service – worse than making them wait too long on hold.
To solve this problem, it would greatly help to categorize the customers’ concerns into different departments so that the right agent will receive the calls respectively. You could set up a different contact number on your directory to do this.
Too much automation
While automation offers high profitability, increased customer satisfaction, and faster resolutions, you still can’t rely on it to handle complex problems.
Although automation helps businesses to cater to the high volume of calls and speeds up your overall customer service processes, there are drawbacks to it.
If mishandled, your software systems can also be a huge factor to lead to customer dissatisfaction. Automation cannot emphasize to your clients and personalized responses.
Rude employees
This factor plays a huge role in determining whether you’ve given your clients a good or bad customer experience. This is because your employees receive and handle the requests so it’s up to them how to finish the call.
When frustrated, employees can also turn into rude and irate agents. That’s why it’s crucial to control their own emotions. Try not to take their comments personally as they are not directed towards you but rather to their situation.
If you have a rude employee, coaching them on how to effectively deal with the situation would be best. Helping them to handle their emotions is crucial for your team in delivering the best customers’ experience.
Avoid negative customer experience by going the extra mile
When we talk about providing customer support, it’s hard to estimate if your whole team has their A-game on with them. After all, there are a lot of factors that could contribute to a negative customer experience.
So to consistently provide high-quality customer service, it’s important to spot these factors and have the right systems and processes in place to resolve them.
While these factors can be the common denominator of a bad customer experience, they can also be a good basis for you to start fail-proofing your customer support.
