You believed you were doing well until you noticed it. A customer is dissatisfied with your service and has indicated that they are considering canceling. So, what exactly do you do? How do you deal with an annoyed customer? Is there anything that can be done to keep them from churning? How do you restore customer satisfaction?
This is a circumstance that customer success and support employees like you experience on a daily basis. Even if you have an excellent product, you will encounter clients who did not have the experience you had hoped for. It is now your responsibility to see if you can help them. It’s not a simple undertaking, and the measures to re-establish confidence can differ.
It is, nonetheless, doable. According to studies, 52 percent of customers will buy more from you if they had a positive experience. Plus point, nothing gives a better opportunity to generate a positive experience than repairing a bad one. Everyone understands that unpleasant experiences happen, but if you do everything you can to rectify the situation and make the consumer happy again, you might just have a customer for life.
Understand Customer Experience with our in-depth guide to NPS
At your firm, difficult customer situations are bound to emerge — perhaps even on a regular basis. There’s no way to totally avoid obstacles, whether your customer is dissatisfied about a product issue, billing issues, or installation isn’t going as smoothly as it could. And the bigger your company or the more complicated your products are, the more obstacles your staff will face.
How to restore Customer Satisfaction
How should your CSM handle these issues and assist in their speedy resolution while rebuilding client trust in your company?
Developing a method that can be adopted by all CSMs or those who assist customer growth is critical to restoring consumer faith in your firm. The goal is to deal with difficult circumstances in such a way that the customer has a positive impression of your business. If you’re lucky, you might be able to persuade him or her to become a future enthusiastic advocate for your brand.
Additional Resource: Customer Loyalty vs Customer Retention
In this post, we’ll look at three ways your CSM team and organization may rebuild customer trust following a difficult situation:
1. Demonstrate empathy for the customer
After your CSMs have listened to their complaint, it’s critical that they empathize with the customer’s situation right away. This builds a bond and ensures that they know their worry has been heard and their situation is understood. When your organization shows empathy, the consumer knows you’ll work with them to address the problem.
Making an apology to clients once anything goes wrong is not a giving away position. It actually helps in restoring customer connection. When a CSM apologizes to a client, whether on their own behalf or on behalf of the firm or another department, they demonstrate civility, decency, concern, effort, and empathy, all of which are important.
During a difficult scenario, offer your customers a heartfelt apology. With this, your CSM will not only restore customer faith and goodwill, but your organization will also reap the rewards of a reinforced customer connection.
2. Maintain a positive outlook
Anyone who interacts with clients must undoubtedly be friendly, helpful, polite, courteous, and flexible. These attitudes and actions are not just desirable, but also expected, especially among customer success leaders. When it comes to problem-solving, however, employee courtesy while addressing the issue helps the consumer forget about the issue.
Customers get a sense of justice and fairness from the company when they are treated with respect, dignity, and sensitivity. A good attitude, as easy as it may seem, is a concrete asset that may have a major impact on consumer confidence and satisfaction.
Even if a CSM resolves the customer’s issue but is unpleasant or uninterested in the process, the relationship may suffer. Simply put, clients will be more satisfied and loyal to your organization if your customer success team members are courteous and handle each scenario with a positive attitude.
3. Deal with the situation as soon as possible.
Not only is it critical to resolve the customer’s issue, but a prompt answer will also improve the customer’s perception of the CSM and your company as a whole. To be able to address conflicts internally across departments, your CSM team must have trust (from the leadership team), empowerment, and training.
But what if your CSM or management team is unable to provide an immediate response or does not have the answer? It’s still critical that they respond to the client promptly and inform them of the efforts they’re doing to resolve the matter, as well as any internal discussions they’re having. The longer it takes your organization to give a complete resolution, the more likely your customers will believe they were handled unfairly. Increase client confidence, contentment, and loyalty by improving your company’s capacity to address problems swiftly and effectively.
A solid playbook:
1st Step: Schedule a 1:1 meeting and ask thoughtful questions to get to the bottom of the bad experience.
2nd Step: Pay attention.
3rd Step: Express empathy for their situation and your willingness to help them.
4th Step: Describe the course of action you intend to take. Obtain confirmation from them that this resolves the problem.
5th Step: Thank them for taking the time to provide you with feedback.
6th Step: Get to work!
7th Step: Follow up with them and let them know what steps you took.
Takeaway
If you deal with unhappy customers on a regular basis, your customer journey map will tell you exactly what you need to know. Either your path map is poorly developed or it is being executed incorrectly in important areas. Determine the phase in which the failure occurs. Bring the consumer back to the beginning of the phase, reset expectations, and agree on shared success criteria.
Then, through a sequence of rapid wins and long-term growth, you must deliver on those conditions. Finally, use quality control to improve the pitfall or disconnect in the affected trip phase, and update all related playbooks for scalable improvement.
