The first thing businesses need to fundamentally understand is that they conduct business with human beings, rather than with bots or similar entities. In other words, business is conducted day after day with humans, which signifies that when there is an issue with a delivery, a product, or just a general complaint, humans typically desire to speak or to communicate with in some acceptable way, form, or manner with a fellow human being. Yet, far too many businesses of today don’t seem to understand or to comprehend this, because they seem to have developed a structure in which they do not desire to relate to those who are their customers, person-to-person, but rather desire to deal with complaints or general issues through that which isn’t human, at all. For instance, there are a significant number of companies that have no customer service phone line to call, and exacerbate that problem by not having even a chat window to at least initiate a chat, and for those that do have an automated chatbot, it tries to be helpful but often just serves to frustrate and to delay the customer from getting satisfaction. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to interact seamlessly with a human in customer service, and it must be acknowledged that this is the case because businesses wrongly believe this is the most cost-efficient way to address such interactions.
Look, no doubt, automation has its place, but so does “hand holding,” and those customers that have a legitimate need but aren’t able to get it satisfied are the very same customers that will seriously consider taking their business elsewhere and/or will be inclined to express their dissatisfaction with a particular company when they aren’t satisfied, through a scathing review which often comes down to the fact that they don’t feel that they have received the respect and service that they believe they had the right to expect.
Indeed, a frustrated customer places businesses in the unenviable position of somehow finding a way to satisfy that customer, which probably would be easier to achieve if that customer had first been dealt with in a way in which they believed that they were considered to be valued by that business, which is best done through human contact. No doubt, customers understand that human interaction costs businesses money, but so does obtaining and keeping a customer, satisfied, and further to the point, businesses ought to stand behind their product and should therefore be willing to take “heat” from an unsatisfied customer, as opposed to hiding behind automated bots which simply don’t do a good job of making a customer feel valued.
Those that are skilled in customer service are the same that know how to empathize and to calm a customer down, and additionally are typically able to come up with a solution that is fair to that customer, of which, it has to be said, that the best time to tackle a problem is before it escalates into something quite uncivil, which signifies that it should be dealt with at the beginning, as opposed to it being seen as something to be dealt with, only when a customer is relentlessly persistent and upset.