Foster your brand's growth with brilliant customer engagement

Engaged and satisfied customers are the biggest assets for any business.

A study found that 63% of consumers would never return to do business with a company after just one bad experience. To add to that, 42% of the customers from the same survey claimed that they would post about their negative experiences online for the world to see.

These numbers point towards the importance of keeping your customers satisfied and their complaints at bay. After all, your business can’t afford to lose its reputation because of bad customer service. As a result, it’s crucial for you to value customer complaints and engagement if you want to take your business to the next level.

When things go wrong, customers will complain, and to ensure that your customers are thoroughly engaged and your brand goes on an uphill slope, you’ll have to take care of those complaints.

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Let’s look at some such issues, queries, or concerns that customers generally raise that you should be prepared to tackle to foster your brand’s growth!

Common Customer Grievances to Tackle

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Very broadly speaking, there are three kinds of customer complaints that you must look into at the earliest. The good news is that all of these complaints can be handled by a customer complaint handling software or a CRM. Let’s look at what they are:

1. Long hold times
   By the time a customer reaches out to your support team with a complaint, they’re already experiencing a lot of frustration. In addition to that, if they’re put on hold for long intervals, things only worsen. Research suggests that nearly 60% of customers feel being put on hold is the most frustrating aspect of a customer service experience.

From your business' perspective, long wait times could mean that the demand for your customer support service is too high. Take a look at the valleys and peaks in your support's demand, and try to staff those times in order to meet the needs. For this, you can use CRMs or customer complaints handling software. These will give you an idea of your customer service's different dynamics, allowing you to tackle the issue of long hold times.

1. Unable to contact support
   Automated digital phone systems can help answer common questions without needing human agents, divert calls to required agents, and a lot more. However, when a customer gets stuck in this loop of automation without a possible solution at hand, it builds frustration and decreases engagement.
   The trick here is to ensure your presence across different channels - phones, messaging, chatbots, social media, email, and more. With the right customer complaints handling software, your agents will be able to easily switch between one channel to another when needed. That way, all your customer queries will be tackled, and none of your customers will have problems reaching out to your support.
3. Having to constantly repeat their problems
   When customers approach any business' support with a query, they aren't looking to repeat their issue to different agents over and over again. This is likely to happen when the support transfers customers from one agent to another or when agents cannot access earlier information about the customer. In both cases, though, the customers have to repeat themselves multiple times, causing frustration and translating to poor customer engagement and experience.

Again, customer complaints handling software, or CRM software, can help remove the pain from this process. With the right tools by your side, you’ll be able to connect customers to the right agents with the required information. Thus saving the time of your customers as well as your agents and keeping both happy! Eventually, this will help your team resolve service tickets faster and foster your brand’s growth.

So far, you’ve understood three broad types of customer complaints that you need to focus on to foster your brand’s growth. Now, let’s look at some steps you can take in order to tackle the said issues and provide superior customer engagement:

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• Identify crucial areas for improvement:
  • Customer complaints are the best source of information to understand the areas of improvement for your business. For that, you can use a centralized CRM software that takes care of customer complaints and allows you to see all of them in one dashboard.
  • Complaints can also help you understand which staff members need extra training or closer supervision. Your support team is as strong as your weakest staff member - uplift them, and you’ll uplift your business!
  • Consistency can also be monitored by taking a closer look at customer complaints. By looking at where most of the complaints are focussed, service levels across shifts, departments, locations, and teams can be clearly seen and addressed.
• Identify the areas of improvement in policies and procedures:
  • If you’ve been receiving continuous customer complaints about your businesses’ policies and procedures, you know what you need to change or improve. Your business might be operating with policies and procedures that are inconvenient for your team or your customers. Or they may be unnecessary or simply unclear. Customer complaints can point to all these cases.
    

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• Offer improved customer communication:
  • In the most basic sense, the foremost way to tackle customer complaints and increase engagement is by taking control of your communication channels.
  • Customer complaints open opportunities for your business, staff, and support team to have frank, open conversations with your customers.
  • These conversations can help customers feel like the vital components to your success, as they rightly are.
• Keep senior management in the loop for major decisions:
  • Customer complaints can often be escalated straight to the top, depending on the severity of the complaint. That way, senior management and leaders of the business will be in the loop when it comes to different issues that customers are facing and what the business is doing to take care of them.
  • While it’s not recommended to pull in the senior management for every other complaint, it will not hurt to have them occasionally involved. This allows them a glimpse into what’s happening on the ground level, and also offers the opportunity to communicate with team members they might not normally have access or time to.
• Improve your staff education programs:
  • Customer complaints always give you much-needed insights into your staff education programs and how you can improve them.
  • The insights derived from these complaints can be used to improve the staff training model to educate and train future team members. They provide rich information to publish for your staff members to read—with your replies, improvements, and recovery action steps.

In conclusion

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The above-discussed items are beneficial to any business looking to offer superior customer service and increase customer engagement. At the end of the day, it all comes down to how much insight you have into your customers’ issues. Only when you know what is wrong, will you be able to devise strategies to fix said wrongs. In that respect, investing in CRM software or customer complaint handling software goes a long way into fostering any business's growth with brilliant customer engagement!

Plag report