Customer care is often overlooked until retailers have reached critical mass, their customer base is hemorrhaging and the situation is impossible to fix.
In fact, these situations have become such a problem that the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University started producing the National Customer Rage Study back in 2003 to monitor them. What they’ve been seeing is that customers are experiencing more problems year over year and customer satisfaction continues to decrease.
Some interesting findings include these:
- In 2015, the Customer Rage Study found that 54 percent of participants expressed frustration with problem experiences, up from 50 percent in 2013.
- Complaint satisfaction had decreased to an all-time low of 40 percent.
- Customers who felt they had received nothing at all were up to 63 percent in 2015, from 56 percent in 2013.
It might seem like customer service should be second nature to someone in a business setting, but in light of these numbers that’s clearly not true in today’s world. It’s clearly more important than ever that you keep your customers happy—otherwise they’ll have no qualms with jumping ship to the nearest retailer who will treat them with a little respect.
Three Simple Ways to Keep Customers Happy
Believe it or not, customers aren’t that hard to please.
The problem is that companies have forgotten that without shoppers, they have no income and thus, no business. You simply need to do what you can to remind your customers that they’re the most important part of your process.
Put yourself in their shoes for a minute, then give these three simple customer pleasing tricks a try:
- Make buying from you easy. You’d be shocked at how difficult it can be to purchase from some retailers, especially eCommerce businesses.From troubles with websites and shopping carts to a basic lack of communication, shopping shouldn’t be an additional stressor for your customers—instead it should be a stress reducer. Introduce easier processes, test your software on multiple platforms before releasing it and implement transparency into your process with the help of tools like customer web portals that show your shoppers exactly where their order is in the fulfillment process.
- Genuinely listen to their problems. Customers contact you for a variety of reasons, none of which can be solved with a boilerplate answer. Instead of forcing your shoppers to fight to be heard, give them tools like chat support and real live humans to answer their emails that can understand and respond to their inquiries appropriately.This is especially important when it comes to reverse logistics, since the customer may already be very frustrated. You can turn negative experiences into potential opportunities for suggestive sales with well-trained, compassionate customer service people who genuinely listen to the problem at hand and fix it efficiently.
- Offer ongoing support. No matter what type of business you’re running, it’s likely there will be another question or a potential for a developing interest over time. This is a golden opportunity to create a customer who is fully engaged with your brand, if you’re open to offering ongoing support for the customer’s lifetime. Reach out with regular information via newsletters, using social media or through informative blogs on your website and allow your employees to be resources for customers, even if they don’t happen to be buying anything in the moment.
Even if you offer the exact same product as the next shop, the amount of time you dedicate to making your customer completely, totally happy can make you stand out. As retailers continue to frustrate customers, a little bit of kindness and consideration can go a long way to build your brand.
