“The customer is always right” is a well-known slogan. Customer service is the basis for building your brand’s reputation. Even an unsatisfied client may become your company’s advocate if you manage to resolve their issue in a proper and timely manner.
5 Tips to Regain Your Customer’s Trust After Customer Service Mistakes
Businesses compete for positive customer experience. According to the Consumer and Brand Relationship survey, clients want friendly customer service representatives (73%) and personalized experiences (36%). 86% of consumers are ready to pay more for a better customer experience.
At the same time, 89% of them choose a competing company after a poor customer service experience. Thus, hiring and training customer service representatives is the most critical element to regain the customer’s trust. Here are five ways to repair your brand’s image in your customers’ eyes:
1. Don’t disregard client appeals; give timely answers to all reviews and complaints.
If a company gets negative feedback or a complaint, the first step is to immediately contact the unsatisfied customer. This will help handle the client’s issue, keep them happy, and recover from negative customer reviews.
One of the main reputation recovery strategies is to act fast in handling complaints. The customers expect to receive a response to their online reviews within 7 days and companies should remember that a negative review will stay negative forever if a customer service ignores it. Answering complaints is a must.
2. Provide your customers with sufficient information on extra payments, additional services, etc.
Lack of information drives away clients and harms the brand’s reputation. Every time employees forget to provide clients with full information, they add another person to the list of unsatisfied customers.
Reputation recovery strategies, in this case, include the following:
- Keep customers up to date on what’s being done to resolve the issue.
- Work out ways to resolve similar negative incidents in the future.
- Use the negative review or complaint as a learning opportunity to prevent such issues in the future.
- Stay informed on the customer service policies.
3. Stick to an agreed-upon schedule and keep promises. Don’t screw up orders.
If customer service representatives promised to get back to clients, they must do it within 24 hours. That’s the rule—even if there is no solution yet! The purpose of customer service is to help resolve the client’s problems and prevent similar issues in the future. In order to do it, a customer service representative should do the following:
- Ask the customer detailed questions to understand the problem and resolve it.
- Apologize to the customer, summarize his/her answers, and discuss the case with colleges or a supervisor.
- Find a solution and fix the problem.
- Get back to the customer with the good news that their issue has been resolved, and ask whether they have any further questions.
4. Be ready to act in unexpected situations.
The way customer service communicates with unhappy clients determines what they say about the company afterward. Mistakes and accidents are unavoidable in totality. Be ready for them. The customer service team can employ the psychological practice of “if-then planning” like the hotel company Ritz-Carlton does.
Their rule is simple: “If a customer has been waiting for more than 20 minutes, then reset their internal clock with a complimentary item from the appetizer menu or with a free drink.”
Ritz-Carlton trains its employees to anticipate the unexpressed wishes of their guests. Thus, the company turns angry clients into satisfied ones and wins back lost customers.
5. Don’t demonstrate unprofessional customer treatment.
It is sometimes hard to be calm when customers argue. However, it is unprofessional to make a customer feel uncomfortable or awkward.
Good customer service increases your profits, makes your customers come back, works as word-of-mouth advertising, and strengthens your brand. Decent customer treatment makes clients happier while resolving their issues.
The goal of every business is to make customers happy. Companies try to meet their clients’ needs and may make mistakes on the way. However, there are ways to repair the company’s reputation. Use the tips mentioned in this article to persuade your customers to come back.
