The more issues that your organization has to address, the more customer service matters. With most of the survey research that CSS performs for clients, we conduct additional correlation analyses to identify which aspects of the customer experience or relationship with the business tend to have the greatest impact on loyalty, willingness to recommend, or overall customer satisfaction.
With some of our clients – those that by the nature of their business have lots of difficult customer situations – there are interesting attributes that drive overall satisfaction. For one event-based client, whether the customer had traffic issues AFTER the event had a strong impact on overall customer satisfaction. In other words, if that last impression was bad, the overall event satisfaction went down; if the exiting process was quick/easy, the overall satisfaction was much higher.
Similarly, our surveys for a local government code enforcement agency continually note that when issues are resolved quickly/fairly and staff listen well to customers, overall satisfaction is much higher. When issue handling is poor, overall satisfaction is poor.
Oftentimes we think customer satisfaction is driven by the “WOW” or the exceptional experience, but with many industries overall customer satisfaction is determined by what transpires when things go bad.
To make sure you’re “good” when things go bad, here are quick summaries of comments from customers about what they want in an issue resolution experience:
- Listen to and understand my perspective
- Don’t rush me
- Apologize
- Own the resolution – even if you didn’t cause the problem
- Provide direction – Where do I need to go? What do I need to do?
- Respond quickly to my inquiries
- Keep me up-to-date
- Include me in decision-making, preferably with options
- Resolve issues fairly.
Simple tips, but they are tips direct from customers that directly impact their overall satisfaction. Sometimes it is easy to deliver good customer service when things go well.
Make sure you’re good when things go bad.
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