Five Big Customer Service Mistakes
And How to Avoid Them
Companies that are considered the gold standard for customer service wield it as a powerful differentiator, enabling them to distance themselves from competitors. There are common denominators these leading companies use to make their reputations. By adhering to best practices in service delivery, they’re set up to provide a superior experience each time a customer contacts them using that opportunity to deepen the relationship, for increased loyalty, retention and revenues. Conversely, there are also common mistakes that organizations make that hinder service delivery. Here are the leading mistakes customer service departments make—and surefire ways to avoid them.
1. Not using self-service for deflection. Customers have taken to Web-based self-service—handling everything from simple product registration to IT break/fix issues—in vast and growing numbers.
Of the numerous benefits a self-service strategy provides, cost reduction is a leading driver. Self-service also increases user satisfaction with the provider, thus strengthening the relationship and increasing the possibility it will be a long-term, lucrative one.
After implementing an integrated customer service software suite with self-service capabilities, Coremetrics has seen customer satisfaction and agent productivity jump significantly, says Paige Newcombe, senior director, global client services for the marketing optimization software provider.
Since its knowledgebase implementation, Coremetrics has seen nearly 50% of its support queries originate with the self-service knowledgebase, keeping its agents working on more difficult, mission-critical problems. Further, customer satisfaction has jumped to 90% and customer loyalty to 93%.
“Web self-service has allowed us to keep support staff levels the same. We’ve grown our client base by 350% without adding headcount, which reduces our cost of providing service. Without it we would have needed a new agent for every 10 new clients,” says Newcombe.
2. Not offering integrated, multi-channel support. Self-service doesn’t suffice as the only offering in a support organization’s arsenal. Some customers simply don’t take to self-service, preferring the more intimate experience of talking to someone on the phone. They may decide it’s more effective to send an email, or to get live assistance by hitting the click-to-chat button.
If the business decides it’s going to offer multiple channels for gaining service, integration is key. A lack of integration leads to inconsistent delivery standards, knowledgebase content, sloppy escalation, cost inefficiencies and plummeting customer satisfaction.
This problem has more companies choosing to purchase their customer-facing applications in integrated, multi-channel suites with out-of-the-box integration.
3. Not leveraging social media. Great customer service has long been one of the best forms of marketing, but today, the two practices are more closely tied than ever. Thanks to social media, customers have the ability to rapidly and loudly advertise their happiness, or wreak havoc on a company until their anger dissipates.
Given people’s increasing comfort to social media as a communications vehicle, service organizations that ignore these networks not only set themselves up for some nasty surprises, but miss out on a significant opportunity to use the chatter to engage users.
Best-in-class customer service platforms include forum functionality so businesses can create a hospitable place for their users to congregate, socialize and solve problems. These suites also integrate their ticketing capabilities with platforms like Twitter and Facebook, allowing organizations to automatically create tickets based on chatter.
4. Not capturing customer feedback from support transactions. Support organizations should not only make use of the feedback they can find all over the Web on social networks and at home on their own forums, but through each and every service interaction they have. Too many rely solely on support center metrics and ignore valuable information that can come straight from the source.
There are multiple instances where it makes sense to capture feedback directly from the customer—at the point of interaction or as a follow-up to a transaction. The support organization’s team can generate a feedback mechanism as they close a chat session, a ticket, or after they’ve served up a knowledgebase article, while they have the sentiment of the customer at the ready.
5. Not using tracking and reporting tools. Measurement is the foundation of service and support, but too many service organizations measure everything possible and then do nothing with the data. Within these metrics often lie the keys to problem areas, avenues to improvement, and better overall customer satisfaction. As long as they’re out measuring everything from first-contact resolution to abandonment rate, across every channel, they should use what they capture to unlock the information that can translate to critical business improvements.
e-MDs, a provider of EHRs and other clinical applications, uses reporting tools to review such metrics as time-to-resolution to tailor their training programs and staffing levels, according to James Foster, client data operations manager.
Another area that’s benefiting from reporting and analysis is e-MD’s development team, taking advantage of the knowledge-sharing between development and service that technology providers are always seeking.
“Our reports give us solid data that we can give to the development team to address issues in future releases of our products,” says Foster.
Parature enables organizations to better serve, support, engage with and retain their customers via the Web. Industry-leading, on-demand Parature Customer Service software provides customer service organizations with a comprehensive, multi-channel way to meet the growing expectations of their customers. With more than 10 years experience, Parature serves organizations in a wide variety of industries worldwide and helps support more than 16 million end users. Parature is among Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Software Companies and is the recipient of numerous product, technology and leadership awards. Parature is headquartered in Vienna, VA, with offices in San Francisco and the UK. For more information, visit www.parature.com or follow @parature on Twitter.