Providing great customer service is not a choice or luxury; it's a standard your customers expect.

The customer experience can win you many new leads or make you go bankrupt depending on how it goes. 

Caring about and addressing customers’ needs is crucial for success. However, if overwhelmed and covered with tasks, teams often struggle to deliver results and build relations with clients. 

Customer service mistakes 

While some companies start implementing good practices, they still may make mistakes that can affect their brand recognition in a negative way. 

Often, companies are lulled into a false sense of security by seeing decent business results, but there's no client relationships behind them, so in the long-term, the business may not be profitable.

For example, selling products on Black Friday. Sales growth can skyrocket, but only for a moment if you don’t keep your new clients in the loop with your communication and spotless customer support. Easy come, easy go. 

9 common customer service mistakes: what are you lacking? 

By now, you're probably wondering how can you spot and fix these issues quickly. So let's take a look at the most common customer service mistakes and what you can do to remedy them. 

1. Lack of understanding customer behavior

It is not always easy to understand what is in your customer’s mind. However, this can not be an excuse not to care about their insights and thoughts. There could be quite a few bottlenecks on your website that make your clients resign from further interaction or purchases.

In the case of online shops, it is relatively often about errors in a payment section or a non-working mobile version. Tiny details can kill your conversion.

In the case of some landing pages, a slight change of call-to-action (CTA) buttons can determine the amount and quality of leads.

Constant analysis of customer behavior has to be an element of your strategy. A lack of understanding customer behavior can cost you a lot of time and money and negatively affect your company’s workflow and cashflow. Reassure yourself that you check it on a regular basis. Use tools to analyze high-quality session replays and behaviors on your website. 

2. Lack of responsiveness

Love it or hate it, but you need to be in constant contact with your clients. Wherever and whenever they write to you, they expect you to answer as soon as possible, and they won’t buy your explanation of why you answered back so late. 

Clients hate changing platforms. If they message you, they are likely to be annoyed if you call them back. If they call you, they don’t want to wait for ages for your explanatory e-mails; they want an answer right here and right now.

Of course, it won’t always be possible, but whenever you are able to, respond and act quickly. You can implement some solutions for making your customer service quicker or more precise. Configuring chatbots can support narrowing issues and make it easier for the whole team responsible for customer support.

Your clients can understand slower responses during weekends, but ignoring their requests for a couple of hours during working days can really put them off and make them choose your market rivals’ offer. 

3. Lack of staff training or the right employment

No customer service team will deliver great results if it consists of people who do not understand or like your business. The meaning of a dedicated customer service team is huge; they should strive to do their best job. If you don’t take care of onboarding or do it too quickly, you put your business at risk, as people may not be trained enough and, therefore, they may not be helpful for your clients.

Staff training not only helps your employees, but it also helps you verify if you have chosen the best people for your business. While you shouldn’t write anyone off too soon, having some ideas of potential performance is always warmly welcomed. 

Sometimes, it can not be about staff training, but staff size. Hiring too many people, especially at the beginning of your business journey, can impact your cash flow. You can be sure that any peaks of traffic will be handled quickly and clients do not wait for too long. However, usually the problem is the other way around.

You may regard understaffing as the perfect way to save some budget, but it can drag your business down pretty quickly. If there is nobody to handle client requests and complaints, it is extremely likely that you’ll start losing clients. Your competition does not sleep. 

4. Lack of data

Data is all around us. What you need to do is to pick it and get into deep analysis. The more data you have, the better service you can offer. On a smaller scale, you may not see much difference, but when you have thousands of customers all over the world, you need to optimize some processes.

You need to have data about your clients and your team performance at your constant disposal in order to identify potential problems that both your customers and team members can encounter. 

Getting high-quality data can be really difficult, but not if you use the right tools. If your customer service department heavily relies on inbound or outbound calls, you may want to do the most of call tracking and call statistics to figure out whether your team works well or what areas can be improved. 

Need some help in this department? Find the highest-rated inbound call tracking software to get your feet off the ground. 

If, within the same call center, you need to deal with thousands of callers or calls each day, knowing more about them can save you a lot of time spent on each call.

For example, a call from a client who is not satisfied with their order can be managed easier if the customer service employee can access information about that order without looking for ages. Thanks to tools for call center management and various integrations, support can be easier, more precise, and much quicker.

Similar rules apply to some outbound call centers. If you had a potential lead on the list, it would be worth knowing why they hadn’t converted earlier or whether they resigned from further cooperation. 

5. Lack of taking customer feedback seriously

You are not a magician; you probably can’t make all of your clients’ wishes come true with a magic wand. However, you should take each and every of these wishes seriously, as they may address features your products or services lack.

If this repeats, which means that you are getting more messages of this type, you should definitely think about introducing such a feature or improve the option.

Customer feedback is the integral element of improvements, and ignoring it can cost you a lot. By taking customer feedback seriously, you are showing your clients that their opinions matter and that you want to make the products or services answer their needs and requirements. Your customers may feel appreciated and show bigger loyalty to your brand, or even become brand ambassadors. 

6. Lack of procedures

You don’t have to be a master of procedures and document every 10 seconds of your businesses' existence. However, you need to make and implement some procedures within your customer service team. 

What should the set of procedures consist of? 

Internal communication is extremely important for the team to stay in the loop with all updates or issues and exchange pieces of information in the most efficient way. Using internal communications software can help expedite information sharing among team members and allow you to keep track of social interactions among employees at all levels. 

Crisis communications and procedures. Unsatisfied customers are often willing to start the fire that can harm your brand. Identify what to do when you encounter such a situation. Reach out to customers to ensure their concerns are being taken into consideration and ask them what you can do to make processes easier across the board. 

How do you deal with complaints? Apologizing may not be enough if you want to turn a complaint into a win for your brand. What to deliver to decrease the number of complaints or requests? Prepare a checklist to ensure you are taking very great care of your clients, but update it on a regular basis.  

7. Lack of building relationships with clients

This is a mistake made by both customer service and sales teams. 

Being busy with tasks and dealing with requests, the members of such teams have no time - or will - to build any further relations with clients. No one says to befriend every client, but finding out how they are doing after an order, message, or complaint help build higher brand awareness and relations on the line between the client and the brand.

If your team has no time or willingness of doing so, recognize what the reasons of this approach are and try to work on some solutions. Sometimes, you can even go omnichannel to maximize the potential effects.

For example, if your client calls you with some issues, and you quickly solve them, you may ask the client about making a review of the customer support via text message or email. Many brands are increasingly using an NPS (net promoter score) for such a purpose. 

8. Lack of consistent customer experience

The customer experience you offer should be flawless, no doubt about it. You should be always willing to work on it, even if you think you can’t possibly offer anything extra or new.

If your customer service promises the world over the phone to your clients, but then does not deliver on the arrangements, the customer experience definitely is not consistent and your customers can be confused, being attracted by one branch of your customer service and disappointed by another one. 

Welcome to the year 2019, using tools for automating some processes related to customer service does not come as a surprise. They may make life easier. Your customer service team does not have to deal with every tedious task, so they can focus on the business core and serving your customers right. 9. Lack of tools

Be sure that your team has useful tools, including call center management software or a platform for internal communication and secure file storing. You may also want to introduce an intuitive CRM in your organization to gather even more corresponding data.

Takeaways 

If you read through the list above and were able to comfortably wipe the sweat off your brow, congratulations! You're in the clear. Still, that doesn't mean you should stop striving for perfection. You can always do better both for your clients and potential customers. 

Want to ensure you're making the most of your customers' experiences with your brand? Discover the best customer service software for your company's unique needs.