Customer engagement is such a challenging task. In fact, there are several pitfalls you need to avoid to keep your business standing.
Did you know that 73% of customers now say that customer experience is a deciding factor in whether to purchase from a brand? In this context, you can say that the stakes are even higher for your brand. If you want that competitive edge, you have to level up your customer engagement efforts.
Unfortunately, obstacles in customer interaction are common, and they impede satisfaction and loyalty in different ways. Let’s cover these range of issues as well as some insights on how to address them.
1. Poor Customer Service
Customer service significantly impacts engagement. So, when customers are met with unhelpful staff and slow responses, it becomes one of the worst customer engagement challenges. This negative experience could be the last time customers interact with your brand, resulting in a loss of trust and confidence.
Common causes of poor customer service include inadequate training, understaffing, and lack of employee empowerment. To address poor customer service, train your staff to be knowledgeable in your policies and products. Additionally, encourage them to make decisions that resolve customer concerns swiftly.
2. Lack of Personalization
One secret to improving customer interaction is personalization. Customers are more likely to engage with your brand if you put in the effort to consider their needs. On the other hand, if you hand out generic responses, customers will think that your business doesn’t care about them.
To guarantee personalized experiences, it’s important to make good use of customer data. Take advantage of your customer relationship management (CRM) system to analyze purchase history and customer behavior. Through this, your brand can develop custom recommendations that each customer may like.
3. Inconsistent Messaging
Personalization can imply delivering unique responses for each customer. However, your brand might overdo this and it could result in inconsistent messaging. As one of the obstacles in customer interaction, inconsistency confuses customers. In particular, conflicting information from different channels undermines your reliability.
Your brand can overcome inconsistent messaging by creating a comprehensive style guide. This outlines your brand voice, tone, and messaging strategy. After doing so, let your staff know how to follow the style guide using centralized communication tools.
4. Unreliable Products or Services
Your products are the main reason your customers engage with your brand. However, frequent complaints about poor product quality isn’t the right way to drive customer engagement numbers up. When your products are terrible, it will only hurt your brand image with dozens of negative reviews.
You need to avoid this situation at all costs. But if you’re not cutting corners in developing your products, quality control measures will be your friend. Thorough testing can ensure that what you put on the shelves satisfies customer expectations. Listen to customer feedback as well to gain ideas on how to improve your products in the future.
5. Limited Channels for Interaction
Another significant barrier to customer engagement is when you make your business accessible in only a few channels. Your brand could miss opportunities for further interactions if you stick to the platforms you are already on. For instance, not being present on popular social media sites could cause you to miss out on discussions about your products.
Adding more customer engagement channels may be difficult at first, but this is something that’s worth doing. If you haven’t already, consider integrating your communication platforms including social media, live chat, phone, and even in-person interactions. Some customers prefer direct options to interact with your brand, so going multichannel is your best bet.
6. Neglecting Customer Feedback
Nothing discourages customers more from interacting with your brand than ignoring their feedback. When this happens to them, they might think putting forward some suggestions is just a waste of time. What’s worse, they could tell other people that your business doesn’t pay attention to what customers have to say.
If you don’t want this to happen to you, make sure each customer comment is being noted. Improving customer interaction also involves analyzing the input given by customers. With this, you can gain valuable insights on how to better serve your customers.
7. Overwhelming Amount of Communication
While ignoring customer feedback drives customers away, reaching out to them too much yields the same results. Bombarding customers with too many notifications or messages is counterproductive to customer engagement as it actually becomes annoying. As a result, customers might unsubscribe from your communications.
Finding the right balance prevents communication from being one of the obstacles in customer interaction. Just make sure your messages are timely and relevant to maintain interest from your customers. In addition, provide an opt-out option to show respect for customers’ preferences.
8. Poor User Experience (UX)
Having your own website or mobile app is generally a great thing to have. But if it’s slow, buggy, or hard to use, it might be more of a liability than an asset. A poor UX will only frustrate customers and bring about a negative perception of your brand.
Before the aesthetics, focus first on developing a user-friendly interface on your website or mobile app. You can also make your website mobile-responsive to enhance customer engagement. Just make sure to conduct regular UX audits and usability tests to identify any bugs.
9. Privacy Concerns
Data security technology is at an arms race with cybercriminals. This means people will always be concerned about their digital information. Mismanagement of customer data will make them susceptible to cyber attacks. Meanwhile, lack of transparency on data usage may diminish the level of trust from your customers.
Customer distrust means an eventual loss of customer engagement. To avoid this, embody the best practices for securing customer data. Consult global standards like the GDPR and HIPAA as they provide guidelines for safeguarding information. Also, be transparent about how data is used and stored to reassure customers that their information is safe.
10. Inflexible Policies
Just because you are replying to your customers’ concerns doesn’t mean your customer engagement is doing well. For instance, if you insist on your business’ strict return, refund, or exchange policies, it can be discouraging for customers. While these policies could preserve your operations, it could also deter customers from making further purchases or engagements.
To recoup customer engagement numbers, implement customer-centric policies. Easy returns, exchanges, and refunds will also encourage repeat business. Finally, communicate these policies clearly to customers to prevent misunderstandings.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, the customer engagement challenges we discussed above could also double as concepts that reinforce the importance of customer interactions. When thinking about your engagement campaigns, it’s important to take note of these pitfalls to maintain a lasting relationship with your customers.
As you may have noticed, some of the aforementioned practices may come from aspects that you think may be helpful. In such cases, you should always be careful with how you use your customer engagement assets.
Partner with Open Access BPO for a Worry-Free Customer Engagement
There is an easier way to get those hindrances off your mind, and that is partnering with Open Access BPO.
We have established ourselves as a premier outsourcing firm specializing in customer support in more than 30 languages. Across four countries, we have grown our pool of agents through inclusive hiring and continuous skills training. As a result, we have become the most trusted partner for customer-friendly solutions.
But that’s not all that makes us a reliable call center. We at Open Access BPO also make sure that our practices remain compliant with international standards like the GDPR and HIPAA. In fact, our processes have earned certifications from world-renowned organizations like the PCI DSS and ISO.
Customer engagement may be challenging, but you can make it less difficult to deal with with Open Access BPO. Contact us today to get a partnership started.
Want to know the secret of top-performing companies? They enhance customer engagement by focusing on their agents needs.
High customer engagement is every brand’s goal. To get there, however, managers must first gain a clear picture of how well they re performing in terms of customer care. Without this knowledge, they ll end up targeting only the symptoms, rather than the root causes, of poor engagement. Thus, every attempt to uplift one s performance will only be in vain.
A culture that fails to highlight the role of frontline employees propels a brand toward failure. |
In their haste to create solutions, many enterprises don t realize that the core problem usually lies within the organization. A culture that fails to highlight the role of frontline employees—the call center agents—propels a brand toward failure. If managers can t optimize the processes that influence agents performance, they won t be able to execute their tasks well.
And then, you already know what happens next: The customer experience suffers, and the brand loses credibility. This is a vicious cycle that can be hard to get out of.
To avoid this, take a look at the four most common culprits behind poor customer engagement.
1. A distraction-filled environment
Employees can easily lose focus if their workplace isn t comfortable or is filled with distractions. You may think that office equipment such as chairs, computers, or headphones barely matter, but they do. Because agents sit in front of a computer all day, all facilities they use must allow them to physically relax. This way, they can fully concentrate on their jobs without difficulty.
Too much noise can also get in the way of agent-customer communication. If this is the case, you may need to invest in noise-cancelling headphones, or better yet, individual office cubicles.
2. Glitch-prone tools
A big portion of customer experience is dependent upon technology. Agents utilize various programs and applications to deliver continuous assistance to callers. However, if they don t function perfectly, they will only slow you down.
Remember that every tool you purchase must first go through a strict evaluation. All forms of technology you acquire must serve a purpose in uplifting the quality of your services. If not, you’ll only be wasting a lot of effort and money trying to fit them into your established strategies to no avail.
3. Lack of involvement
As a way to make call center agents feel valued, let them voice out their opinions or recommendations. The more involved they are in the company s activities, the more motivated they will be to carry out their duties the best way they can.
On the contrary, if they don t feel that they’re essential to the team, you’ll eventually notice their performance declining. Even worse, this could result to high attrition rates.
4. No opportunities for growth
As the most precious asset of companies, employees deserve to be given opportunities to grow professionally and personally. Managers must continuously challenge them and allow them to express their creativity. When you fail to recognize people s hard work, it s as though you re robbing them off the chance to be promoted or play a bigger role in the organization.
The lesson here is simple, although many brands and call centers alike commonly miss it: To heighten customer engagement, businesses must invest in their employees well-being and growth. Otherwise, you ll lose the people who possess the ability to connect your organization with your target audience. Without that lifeline, success would surely be out of your reach.