The Forgotten Side of Mystery Shopping

Every company that leverages the customer-centricity model to grow its brand must consider customer satisfaction to be of paramount importance. Poor service can negatively impact your brand’s identity, affect the customer retention rate, and push away potential buyers. It would also become an easy aid for your competitors to snatch your loyal customers.

What is Bad Customer Service?

When a customer feels that their expectations are not met and they cannot see any possible sign of redemption for the inconvenience, it is considered a poor customer experience. Long waiting hours, complicated automated systems instead of a human agent; rude behavior from the staff, inconvenient return policies, lack of discounts, and minimal to zero feedback response are a few examples of poor customer experience.

Consequences of bad customer experience:

When your customer service is below par, customers are not going to hang on to your brand. In today’s digital world, people are quick to voice their opinions on social media, and it is only going to take a few clicks to tarnish your brand image. It could impact your revenue generation for an indefinite period.

According to Ruby Newell-Legner’s “Understanding Customers”, it takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience. Almost 78% of customers back out of a purchase due to poor service, and 65% of customers change to a different brand soon after. All this data is a testament to how essential it is to cater to your customer’s needs and build brand loyalty. Failing to do so would only lead to poor revenue generation and losing even regular customers.

How can I improve bad customer service:

Regarding customer service, time is of the essence. Data suggests that a response within 10 minutes of their query is extremely important and drastically impacts sales figures.

• Reduce the response time: In today’s fast-paced world, no one is waiting for no one; a furious customer surely would not wait either. As stated previously, a 10-minute response time is crucial to establishing trust and gaining loyalty from them. 

Devising a framework consisting of a proactive support team with quick responses would work far more efficiently than any sales funnel.

• Empathize with your customers: Everyone wants to feel seen and heard. Adding a personal touch would greatly improve a customer’s perception of your brand and they would be quick to spread the news of good service through word-of-mouth publicity. Treat your customer how you would want to be treated.

Reviewing the customer’s background, understanding their query, and a sincere apology with good compensation would certainly improve the customer-brand relationship.

• Declutter your communication channels: A complicated automated system with unclear instructions tends to frustrate customers. Additionally, a poor social media presence fails to connect with people. In a world where everyone is digitally connected, it is crucial to cater to the needs of every age group, especially in the retail industry.

Direct call support and chat support can make a huge difference regarding query resolution since some customers do not prefer automated systems.

• Take good care of your support team: A poor work environment could be one of the reasons for poor customer support. If your staff is overworked and underpaid, why would they be concerned with fixing any issue? This would also pose a threat to your efficiency since there is a higher chance of your employees leaving the company for better pay.

A customer service team is your backbone and has a huge impact on almost every other aspect of the company. Taking good care of your customer service team means taking good care of your overall sales model.

Pay attention to what the team needs and try to find ways to improve it. Build a healthy work environment and reward employees for their hard work. A happy employee results in a happy customer.

• Build evaluation models: Reviewing and evaluating your marketing strategies can help identify any weaknesses and resolve them in a timely manner. Many companies hire mystery shoppers to test out their business models and to understand customer perceptions.

Conducting routine audits helps analyze your marketing strategy, customer experience, analysis of any new framework, and helps improve sales. Apart from this, you can use the customer satisfaction score and NPS (Net Promoter Score) to assess the customer’s needs and make necessary changes.