The internet has become a major part of our lives for the past few years. Users have found this tool best suited to speak publicly about the services or products of a company. According to researchers, many customers rarely buy from brands that leave complaints ignored. With this in mind, if you were to prevent people from leaving negative customer reviews online or switching to competitor companies, you need to consider paying attention to their criticism and deal with them accordingly.
However, this isn’t it. Criticism is the best form of customer service learning as it shows us where we go wrong and how we should build on it. With that, pull up a chair, grab your mug of coffee, and read on to find out some of the reasons why customers leave complaints.
- Poor Customer Complaints Handling
When customer service representatives haven’t been trained accordingly, they might take time to handle problems, and this is known as poor customer service. Customers can be easily irritated once they see a representative’s efforts in solving an issue not succeeding or having no solution altogether. When customers constantly only hear your voice menu, see that you’ve delayed on a live chat, and wait for about two weeks for a reply, complaints will keep on piling up. Keep in mind that they will not directly criticize your staff but vent out on social platforms, such as leaving negative customer reviews, since they wish to be heard.
If your customer complaints team works in the call center, the average call hold is an important factor not to be ignored. This is because a majority of customers want solutions quickly rather than just staying glued to the phone all day. Studies have shown that the majority of customers can stay on the phone for around three minutes, and if it takes more time, most will likely hang up and won’t contact your corporate office complaints team again. This means you can potentially lose your customer base simply because you weren’t quick enough with the phone.
- Poor Delivery of Customer Service
Delivery, be it during the same day, the following day, or sometime during the month, customers wish their products to be brought right on time to their doorstep. Otherwise, slow response or wrong deliveries is a sure way to raise complaints from your clients. If a product is unavailable or has delayed delivery time, it’s good to inform your customers immediately and explain the steps taken to solve the problem and what results are expected. Customers normally have high expectations for services and products that are suitable for their needs, and once they’re disappointed with unexpected delivery schedules and personnel, this might bring criticism your way.
Nonetheless, customers can accept changes to delivery schedules and products if they can relate to the key reasons, but they’ll find unexpected and unexplained delays unacceptable. In addition to this, it’s important to know that if there are things that can discredit your company’s customer base, a broken promise will always top your list. This often comes off in situations when a customer has been informed that they’ll get their products at a certain time and it’s not delivered. This will cost your customer’s loyalty and eventually ruin your organization’s image.
- Corporate Office Complaint Disappointment
One of the other major reasons for customers leaving complaints or negative customer reviews online is failing to meet their expectations. Customer disappointment covers a broad spectrum of reasons, but in many situations, it’s the company failing to live up to the customers’ expectations before and after they get to experience a service or a product. If you understand the issue as a manager, you can begin to calculate how to prevent this from happening again in the future because customers can give you an angle about the problem of your product or service for you to fix.
If you fail to resolve the issue, customers will eventually lose faith in your company. In light of this, customers can be very patient when it comes to giving companies chances to redeem themselves before finally surrendering and venting their disappointments on social media.
Conclusion
With the internet currently being available to everyone, clients have many ways of sharing their experiences with a wide online audience. The more people learn about your company’s excellent service; the more customers would be interested in your products or services. On the other hand, things could get worse if your customer service is wanting. People can review negatively online and let others know, thus hurting your company’s reputation and discrediting your services.
Now, we hope that we have provided some valuable knowledge from this article, and we would welcome hearing your views about other causes for customers’ complaints in the form of comments below. We welcome hearing what others might be experiencing too!
