Are You Risking Brand Damage with Bad Customer Service?
Building a successful brand takes time. Unfortunately, causing irreparable damage to it can happen all too quickly and easily.
One of the critical aspects of business that impacts on brands is customer service, and this is especially true where brands often interact with their customers online.
The challenge for brands is to deliver a good level of customer service remotely, as Paul Lawton, Commercial Director of Chat Heroes, explains.
“It’s one thing to be able to take advantage of the internet’s open-all-hours culture, but it is quite another to be able to back this up with the sort of attentiveness and individual service people associate with physical, human, one-to-one customer service.”
The Risk of Brand Damage
How do brands connect with their customers at a meaningful level?
If, for example, they lack a physical storefront, or the infrastructure to support a manned call centre for extended hours, how will customers be able to reach them to ask those simple initial questions that often lead to so much more?
“There’s an all too familiar complaint regarding online brands that everything is fine until something goes wrong. Then customers experience the difficulty in making their own personal issues heard and understood.”
“No brand is truly tested until it faces challenging circumstances, where it must work harder to satisfy its customers. Bad customer service can cost companies millions”
Paul Lawton, Chat Heroes
“In an Ombudsmen Services report, 79% of people said they would avoid a brand if they had received poor customer service from it in the past.”
“Customer service sits at the heart of a brand, and it can be the thing that makes or breaks many smaller brands competing in busy markets.”
Improving Online Customer Service
In the digital economy, markets are much more customer-oriented, against a background of shortened lifecycles for products and increased competition.
“Increasingly, smart technology adds a more vivid aspect of personalisation to products. But this means brands must have the kind of customer service to match this.”
What happens when a customer is poised to make an online purchase but they just need that additional reassurance? They are unlikely to want to pick up the phone, especially if they believe that the company will be shut and emailing the company will simply lengthen the process.
The risk is that you will lose the sale, just as you can lose customer goodwill if you cannot respond effectively to online complaints.
There is a solution that sits between email and the telephone, that incorporates elements of both in one convenient, customer-friendly package.
“Outsourced live chat can revolutionise online customer service as it enables customers and prospects to have the meaningful contact they crave, while providing brands with the tools necessary to manage customer relationships efficiently and cost-effectively”
Paul Lawton, Chat Heroes
Why Wait with Live Chat?
Outsourced live chat offers a solution at multiple levels:
- It is as if the customer has direct, personal contact with an agent, but it is online
- It is as if it is your own, in-house online customer service team
“No one gets put on hold and no one gets frustrated,” Paul concludes. “You can see your response come up onscreen. A professional, outsourced live chat resource provides high quality customer interaction.”
The North East England Chamber of Commerce has been using Chat Heroes’ live chat service for the past two years.
To experience the benefits of using a UK-based, manned web chat service for your brand, Chat Heroes offers a free 30 day trial, that you can discover more on their website www.chatheroes.com.
