5 Tips To NOT Help Send Your Customers To Competitors

Did you know that 76% of your customers are likely to switch to a competitor after 2 negative bad experiences with your CS team?

If you didn’t know, that’s alright, there’s a bunch of jaw dropping statistics you can find in Zendesk’s 2022 CX Trends.

In this post I’m going to be focusing on helping you to avoid having your customers switch to a competitor. Economy is bad enough as it is, so you don’t need any of that churn to affect you even more. Happy to address what I’ve learned so far in 14 years of CX and working at Zendesk.

Here’s 5 Tips To Help Your Business Avoid Your Customers Switching To A Competitor

1. Make sure it is easy for your customers to reach out to you

Few things are more stressful than having an issue with a company you’re doing business with and not being able to get in touch with them. Something to take into consideration: I for one like email but I am a manager and that’s my thing, I like to think and analyse what I’m going to say. However some people like to get in touch fast and get an answer immediately via phone or Chat. If they’re 60+ they like phone, if they’re over 15, they like chat and social media. Some people are introverts and don’t like to interact with anyone so they prefer to self serve by reading through a knowledge base or using a form.

2. Improve your first reply time

If it’s over 1 min for talk and chat, it’s not good, if for email and forms is over 3h, it’s not good either.

Let’s take a closer look at why this might not work as you expect it to. Here’s a few reasons why your first reply time is not up to speed:

1. You categorisation if off.

2. Your routing is not working.

3. Your customer service agents don’t know what they need to do because they’re queues are misleading or they lack training.

4. You’re lacking a team leader.

3. Routing matrix - Make sure agents know what to work on

Assuming you’re doing a good job categorising your requests and you know what comes into the system for the types of requests, areas supported, tier support etc, next step is to create a routing matrix. What is a routing matrix? Well, the purpose of it is to make sure all your support requests end up in the correct queue so an agent can handle them. I have created a youtube video about it here. Alternatively, an automation gets that request out of the way by answering with an article suggestion or a pre-built conversation. AIs can do wonders if configured correctly.

4. Set the right expectation for your customers

It’s ok if your processes take time, that’s normal. However, customers need to feel like they’re engaged and know what’s going on. There’s nothing more frustrating than being in the dark and not knowing if you have been heard and/or seen. Be transparent, set realistic expectations and everything will be fine. Your customers will understand and value your integrity.

5. Improve ticket resolution - train your staff and make sure your SLAs are being met

1. If you don’t have your processes laid out so everyone can see how to handle the different types of requests that end up in your system, then you’ve got a problem. Imagine how much time you waste training someone new and then having to do it all over again in a short period of time once you scale again. That causes frustration for you as a manager and for your agents as they don’t know how to do their job and feel pressured to do better without knowing how. After all, a CS job is pressing from 2 sides: clients who want an answer fast, and management who want good performance. Create an internal assessment of processes, create a step by step guide on how to handle these requests and then put them into internal articles in your knowledge base. Start thinking big so you can become it. Documented processes are the factions that make the difference between companies that struggle and companies that flourish. If your CS lead leaves the company, all that knowledge goes with them. Are you willing to take that risk?

2. Use Service Level agreements to keep your staff accountable. Send notifications if SLAs are being breached. Keep team accountable by looking at performance reports for breached SLAs and reasons why that’s happening.

What do you think? Would you have any different approach? What is it?

If you enjoyed this article, I am very happy! If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it.

You can send an email at dominic@roca.work if anything.

See you soon 👋

By the way, this is my face, I wrote this article so if you want to love or hate me for it, tell me during a FREE strategy sesh.