Providing excellent customer service to your clients and customers is imperative if you want to run a profitable, successful business. Regardless of the size of your business, customers demand a great overall experience through each experience they have with your company.
When you fail to deliver desired results in this area, you could receive bad reviews and bad word-of-mouth comments that ultimately may damage your company’s reputation. In some cases, a bad review could even go viral on social media platforms and cause considerable or possibly irreparable damage.
On the other hand, when you spend ample time ensuring that each customer receives great service, you may expect to have happy customers who rave to friends and others about your company. Understandably, you want to fall into the latter group to retain your customers and to potentially attract even more through referrals. Avoiding these factors could help you to improve the customer experience that you and your team members provide.
1. Employing Pushy Sales Tactics
Your sales process should be low-pressure and helpful. While you need your sales staff to be available to answer questions, they should not follow customers around or be pushy. You want your customers to make an informed decision about the products they buy so that they are most pleased with the results.
Rather than focusing on hardcore sales tactics, revise your approach to educate your customers and to deliver true value that makes them appreciate your company’s efforts to satisfy their unique needs.
2. Paying No Attention
While some sales staff may be overly pushy, others may simply disregard customers altogether. This type of rude apathy can leave customers with a bad taste in their mouths and make them feel unimportant. Such customers often will go to another provider to make a purchase, and this will be a provider that makes them feel more valued and appreciated. These customers may never return to give your business a second chance.
Customers should be greeted within a few minutes after they walk into your establishment. Remember that you also should answer your phone within a few rings to provide callers with a great experience. Likewise, emails and social media comments also require a prompt and helpful response.
3. Showing Anger or Exasperation
Some customers can be truly tiring or stressful to deal with, and this experience can be worsened when you are already having a bad day. Rather than raise your voice or take a snarky, sarcastic attitude when dealing with rude or unhappy customers, simply take a deep breathe and focus on professionalism at all times.
You should be able to control your own emotions while dealing with emotional customers at all times in order to prevent an unnecessarily dramatic escalation. Remember that losing your temper or getting sarcastic with a customer is a great way to damage your company’s reputation and to lose customers in the process.
4. Being Overly Formal
While there is something to be said for treating all of your customers with a degree of professionalism, being overly formal rather than personal can be a turnoff for many of your customers. You should never appear to be dry or robotic.
Always use a friendly, personable tone with direct and written communication alike. Smile frequently and make eye contact. When appropriate, shake their hand, and even incorporate a touch of humor into your comments to make the communication more personalized. This type of less formal communication should also relay into your social media comments and email messages.
5. Leaving Their Problems Unsolved
When a customer has a complaint or problem, they want an immediate response and solution when possible. They often view such issues as a hassle or inconvenience in their lives, and they understandably expect your prompt attention to satisfactorily address the issue.
You should focus your attention on addressing problems promptly as soon as they come up, and seek assistance quickly if you are not able to address the matter yourself. Communicate with your customer along the way to let them know that you are working on the issue, and remember to tell them when and how the matter is resolved.
While poor customer service can drive your customers away and even prevent new customers from trying out your products or services through negative word-of-mouth advertising, the opposite is true when you have happy, satisfied customers. Each of these five mistakes should be avoided if you want to encourage your customers to have a great buying experience.
I worked with a lot of sales people and constantly thank the gods that I didn’t pick up those pressured sales tactics. I find, just walking someone through the process on what information they need and how they can make their decision puts your prospect in the right mind to ask questions. Your prospect, not you drives the process. Once you give your prospect that level of power, they relax, and share with you things they wouldn’t normally share.
Thank you for your comment Chris, I’m with you on that one.
It’s bugging me that I can’t recall who said “don’t sell — make it easy for the customer to buy”.