4 Tips For Reducing Unhappy Or Unimpressive Customer Experiences
In life, you can’t please everyone. When it comes to how we manage our own lives, we tend to accept that as fact and try to do the best we can anyway. We please those we care about and don’t worry about the opinions of those who we may not interact with outside of a few meetings.
Yet in business, this is not a good strategy . We cannot simply brush away the concerns, worries, or poor experiences of those who, in good faith, tried to interact with our firm. Polite disagreement is fine, such as when we politely lay out the true details of customer interaction in a spiteful review left to damage our brand after we had to deny them service, for example.
However, for the most part, a poor experience is something that we can use to better our firm and understand its operations. Even if the issue wasn’t entirely our fault, it’s good to take responsibility because that’s what can affect change and help inform our actions going forward.
Reducing the amount of unhappy or unimpressive customer experiences is a good target to aim for. If we can reduce this by 20% year on year, that’s worthwhile. Let’s consider how this may be applicable:
Empower Your Customer Support Staff
Solid customer support can turn a bad experience into a good one, or at least one where we become impressed by the level of understanding and care invested into our issue. It’s one thing if someone lets you down, but if someone makes a great and sincere effort to rectify the issue and provide a gesture of goodwill? Are you more likely to trust that individual or entity? We’d say you are.
So, empowering your customer support staff to come with administrative possibilities in rectifying issues, be that adding credit to an account, issuing refunds, getting to the bottom of an issue, and apologizing on behalf of your firm, well, even if it’s the customer’s fault, that can make the entire effort worth it. After all, a customer is much more likely to tell their friends about a bad experience with your firm rather than a good one, so this way you may be pulling the plug on potentially negative word-of-mouth marketing.
Document Everything
From providing order receipts to chat log communication transcripts after a live chat exchange is concluded, all the way up to providing the minute order, packaging, and delivery tracking information, you can be assured that firms that overcommunicate tend to eliminate confusion or worry from the process of interacting with their services.
This means that negative experiences born out of miscommunication or confusion can be effectively eliminated because with every step your business makes, it will have communicated its intent and current status. This way, a complaint that may have come can be assuaged, be that a delivery arriving two days later than expected or perhaps offering a customer a pre-order for new stock rather than thinking they’ve ordered an available item and feeling annoyed that delivery hasn’t been made. Communication, as always, is king.
Use The Best eCommerce Platforms
It’s good to use an eCommerce platform with the features most appropriate for your brand, and you can use https://www.atwix.com/magento-adobe-commerce-vs-shopify/ to better see comparisons between the major players like Adobe commerce, Shopify, and Magento.
When you can integrate a seamless, easy-to-understand, and worthwhile platform, customers find the buying process to be much easier and simpler, and all of the relevant information is communicated with clarity. Platforms like this also help your staff keep on top of their deliverables and workflow, meaning that mistakes are reduced significantly.
Customer Feedback
Unfortunately, you’re not going to be able to assuage or fix every customer issue. For some, one problem is enough for a customer to ignore your business for the rest of their lifetime. That’s just how it goes.
However, these customers are certainly going to feel motivated to express their distaste or concerns, and so leveraging that is always going to be useful. Providing worthwhile portals by which they can raise their concerns and complaints is key. A dedicated email address can work here, accepting public reviews , and of course, passing along communications sent to your support team that may be of relevance. You may also send out anonymous surveys, the completion of which offers a light discount on their next order.
From here, you can use that information to potentially avoid a bad experience for the next user.
Sustainability
While no business wants their customers to have a poor experience, when these instances occur, it’s an opportunity to welcome stakeholder input. Doing so in a transparent manner and incorporating that feedback is critical to the evolution of the business. For instance, perhaps a customer comments on the product packaging. By inquiring as to the complaint, there may be options to explore sustainable packaging options or even sustainable delivery for the goods.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily reduce unhappy or unimpressive customer experiences going forward.
