Top 5 Customer Support Mistakes You Must Avoid
Wondering how to create perfect support experience for your customers? Not sure which mistakes to avoid in the process? Read this article and discover the five grave customer support mistakes you must avoid at all costs.
Committing these mistakes will ruin your customer experience and business while avoiding them will help to build a world-class support service. Also, there’s always the option to use offshore technical support and services if you wish to avoid all the hard work.
Most likely, you’ve had a terrible experience with customer support at least once in your lifetime. Think back, reflect on that event. We can bet the support representatives committed at least one of the mistakes we’re going to list below:
- Not taking responsibility
- Arguing and blaming the customer
- Asking for the same information more than once
- Sending self-help links
- Using only one channel for support
We will describe each of these mistakes in detail and explain how to avoid them in your support process.
Avoiding Responsibility
This is the worst mistakes you can ever commit not only in customer assistance but in business, in general. Winners don’t fear responsibility, they accept it. Losers always blame others and try to get rid of responsibility. Customers hate it when support representatives refuse responsibility.
It is important to note that your staff should not take anything personally, especially when customers blame them for their issues. They should accept responsibility, nevertheless, and do whatever it takes to successfully resolve customers’ issues.
Arguing and Blaming the Customer
Please, never argue with clients. Don’t tell them they’re wrong (even if they are). Stay polite, kind and friendly and focus on helping and providing value instead of arguing and blaming.
Of course, there are always exceptions to this rule such as when customers directly insult you and behave very impolitely. In all other cases, you must stay calm and do your best to help your customers.
Asking for the Same Information More Than Once
Customers just hate it. When they use a different channel than usual to get support and customer support representatives request the same information for every ticket it really irritates people.
Therefore, you must ensure that support staff always have access to complete data and history about a customer to avoid bothering customers with repetitive questions. The best way to do it is to implement omnichannel support by using a special solution for this purpose such as Freshesk or Zendesk.
Sending Self-Help Links
You have no idea how frustrating it is when a customer sends a support request and instead of getting their issue resolved they are a sent a link to the knowledge base and are left alone to solve their problems themselves.
If customers are asking for help this means they are likely to have already checked the knowledge base. And even if they have not, this does not mean you must send them away. Make it a rule to never send them self-help links even if solutions to their problems are described in it. Always solve their problems yourself.
Using Only One Channel for Support
It is never a good idea to provide support only via one channel. Most likely, your customers prefer a few different channels, including social media ones. Therefore, when you use only one channel you frustrate other customers who are not using it.
For this reason, you must figure out which channels your customers prefer the most and provide support through them. Fortunately, there exist many solutions which simplify the task of building a multichannel support service.
Final Words
Mistakes in business are expensive. It is especially true when it comes to customer support. Customers are very sensitive to the quality of the support they receive. If it’s poor and unsatisfactory this damages the overall customer experience and your company’s reputation.
Today we have listed the worst customer support mistakes which are avoiding responsibility, arguing and blaming customers, asking for the same information multiple times, sending self-help links instead of solving all issues yourself and using only one channel for providing support. Avoid these mistakes at all costs and you will definitely manage to build a world-class customer support service.