These Are the Warning Signs for Poor Customer Service

Many entrepreneurs are struggling with waning revenue despite the fact that they believe their company is running smoothly. More often than not, this is the unfortunate consequence of business owners being unaware of the fact that they’re equipped with poor customer service representatives who are damaging their brand and crippling long-term profitability.

If you’re serious about attaining success for your brand, you need to make sure the people who represent your company are up to snuff. These are the warning signs for poor customer service that you should look out for, and how to bolster your service in the future.

Don’t be fooled by a calm silence

Many entrepreneurs and small business owners are sitting back, content, because they’ve received few to no complains over the past few weeks or months and think this is a serious sign of progress. As a matter of fact, however, getting fooled by a calm silence is the first step down a disastrous pathway that could set your business up for failure. That’s because a lack of customer complaints isn’t so much indicative of the fact that you’re running the perfect business as it is of the fact that you don’t have effective channels which they can use to contact you when something goes wrong.

Nobody wants to fess up to it, but every entrepreneur and business owner inevitably makes a mistake or suffers from a PR gaffe, and not hearing about these things isn’t insurance that they’re not occurring. Digitizing your customer service operations so that consumers can reach out to you on the web is a great way to solve this problem and guarantee anyone who has a complaint can get their voice heard.

Check out some tried-and-tested methods for modernizing your customer service operations if you think your business is falling behind in an ever-changing digital marketplace. Old school methods of soliciting customer feedback just don’t cut it anymore, and you need blunt, honest feedback from digital sources if you’re serious about initiating impactful changes to your business.

You think quick employees are always good employees

Another common mistake business owners make without realizing it is believing that customer service reps who are quick when it comes to handling complaints are necessarily good. After all, if your worker handled a record-number of complaints to your 1-800 numbers in a short period of time, he or she is clearly efficient! In reality, however, quickly handling customer complaints is likely indicative of the fact that said complaints aren’t being taken too seriously and certainly aren’t being given as much attention as they should be.

At the end of the day, you should focus on producing effective employees who are great at preventing crises from springing up rather than hoping for the fastest employees who can handle the most complaints in the shortest period of time. You obviously shouldn’t be punishing workers for quickly tidying up messes, but run regular audits to ensure you’re not being let down by those representing your company.

Your customer service and marketing operations aren’t connected

By far the biggest mistake that too many entrepreneurs make is establishing a customer service operation and a marketing operation that are completely separate from one another. Customer service and marketing go hand in hand with one another, so it’s imperative that team members in both of these areas are regularly working together and are establishing a strong rapport with each other. Sometimes, this takes some pushing and prodding by management, who should be steering employees towards problems that they can overcome together by harnessing their inner talents.

Check out some of the ways that you can integrate your marketing endeavors into your customer service operations and you’ll be angry you didn’t do some of this years ago, so impressive are the results. When customers come in with a complaint but leave as incredibly satisfied consumers who are likely to return in the future, you should be using that to reach out to prospective new customers to illustrate your company’s capacity to care.

If this seems confusing to you, consider social media platforms, which are the perfect intersection of customer service and marketing. On popular platforms like Twitter and Facebook, customers may rant and rave about how much they hate a particular product or service. This is an ideal time for one of your customer service reps to step in, solve their problems, and bolster your brand in the eyes of the public while making sure that a previous consumer is happy with what you have to offer as a business. One of the gravest warning signs that you’re offering poor customer service is that you lack a major presence on online social media platforms.

Constantly push your employees to do better and make sure they have the technical tools and savvy they need to succeed, and you’ll have better customer service operations in the blink of an eye.