5 Ways to Minimize Customer Struggles

While every business strives to offer its customers a pleasant and memorable experience, there are always scenarios where customers have to face service issues, whether it is long service wait time, website navigation problems or rigid return policies, customers find themselves struggling with one thing or the other. Unhappy or annoyed customers will vent their feelings of anger and share stories of a bad shopping experience on social media. Therefore, companies have to facilitate every individual customer; a single bad customer experience story is enough to ruin a brand’s image. Customer struggles can cause irreparable damage to the repute of a business and can have dire consequences if a company pays no attention to minimize them. Developing a focused customer experience management strategy is the first step towards minimizing customer struggles and improving shopping experience. Here are five ways to get started!

Offer Your Customers Ease and Convenience

Lack of ease and convenience always result in an unsatisfactory customer experience. A customer finding it hard to look up a desired product, or unable to make a payment online because of technical glitches or in another scenario struggling through a series of processes to get a product/service refund would definitely feel frustrated. So the first step towards minimizing your customer struggles is to offer ease and convenience, keep your billing and other procedures simplified and easy. Facilitate your customers by stocking up products categorically so they can easily pick up the ones they want. Keep your website and store easy to navigate so that your customers don’t feel lost or confused.

Proactively Identify Your Customer Service Issues

Put yourself in the customers’ shoes and look out for issues that your customers might be struggling with. It can be bad service, poor communication skills of your staff or delayed delivery. Identifying the impending service issues would give you an edge to resolve them proactively, hence you can make the shopping experience better for your customers. The best way to go about this is customer journey mapping, by utilizing this approach you can analyze customer interactions right from the start till the end. Hence, if there are communication loopholes or you are finding issues with a particular department, they can be fixed and you can modify and improve your customer experience accordingly.

Empower Your CSRs to Promptly Resolve Issues

A customer having a wrong order delivered or looking for a product exchange when he/she does not have the receipt would want a CSR to instantly resolve the issue at hand. This is one of the most common areas where customers struggle and if you want to minimize the frustration for your customers, empower your CSRs to promptly resolve customer complaints. Empowering your customer service staff would reduce the number of unhappy customers, it would also enhance the productivity of CSRs. Your customer service staff can use improvisation or creativity to resolve the most difficult situations. This would make your customers feel satisfied that their issues are being taken care of immediately.

Keep Your Transaction Processes and Policies Flexible

Another reason for customers struggling is complicated transaction processes and policies. Having time consuming or difficult to understand transaction processes can result in customers getting annoyed. There are many businesses that have unclear information on their websites regarding the checkout processes and privacy policies, it ends up confusing the customers and hence they are most likely never to visit such websites again. Be clear and flexible with your transaction processes and policies to make things easier for customers, instead of listing ten clauses of a shipping/refund policy explain it in three or four simple points. Be flexible with your policies and bend the rules a bit to make the experience memorable for customers.

Adopt a Customer Centric Approach while Resolving Individual Complaints

If you want to reduce customer struggles, adopt a customer centric approach when it comes to resolving individual complaints. Every customer has certain expectations from a business and if you want to strengthen your customer base, you need to make sure that every customer feels like a king. If for instance, a customer comes up to you complaining of a rude CSR, apologize to him/her and make sure that such an incident never happens again. You should always give top priority to your customers and make it part of your organizational culture. Having a customer first approach is likely to prevent customer struggles and thus would enhance customer satisfaction levels significantly.