Through the tough times
Andy Ball, managing director at Balls2 Marketing, discusses how clear communication can help keep customers happy.
In the past year, customer service has been put under pressure more than ever.
I recently read a stat from Five9, a cloud software provider, which said that 38% of people in the UK felt the level of customer service they received in the past year had dropped.
Often these issues are not of our own making. The supply chain issues the industry has faced for the last year has had many repercussions, and one of these is a sense of frustration with customers. The fact that it is completely out of the hands of those affected is the main source of this this feeling, as well as the uncertainty over how long it will continue.
Despite being out of your control, it doesn’t mean that it’s OK to leave the communication of the issues to others.
Providing them with the latest updates is a great way of helping your customers feel that they’re important to you. If they are always the first to know of any changes, then they feel valued and they know they can trust you. Everyone in the industry is in the same boat, which means sometimes just putting an arm around your customers is what they need.
Let’s face it, in these tough times getting products to customers and completing orders in a realistic time frame can be counted as a win.
We can’t stress the importance of communicating well right now. A good litmus test of how well you are serving and communicating with customers is to keep an eye on your reviews, whether on Google or social media. That is because when people get frustrated, they want to vent publicly.
This can have a big impact on your future business, with potential customers checking reviews before buying. That’s why we emphasise good customer communications as the best way of avoiding these scenarios.
It has been a tough year and a half for everyone, both inside and outside of the industry, but this report shows that communication still has such a big impact on how well companies perform.
Just one bad day of service, or one incident, can have a genuine impact on your business, by making you lose customers, which is why communication is so important.
