Many companies spend a majority of their time and budgets on chasing business instead of taking care of the customers they already have.
Are you focused on offering the most innovative products and services to your customers? Do you have creative marketing and brand awareness activities for your business in hopes that customers will respond positively and stay?
All of your marketing and product development efforts are wasted if your customers don’t trust you to do what you say you’re going to do.
Following through with customer requests and timely follow-up are great ways to build trust and this trust is a big part of customer loyalty.
Our call center sales and service employees have the opportunity to build trust everyday. Unfortunately, some don’t understand the importance of something as simple as following up when you say you will.
Do these sound familiar?
- A bank CSR promised a call back by 4pm and instead left for the day without calling the customer and letting him know that his major problem was still being researched. The customer found this out when he called later that day and no one else there knew what he was talking about.
- A technology representative was asked to submit a proposal in 5 days and agreed to do so. Unfortunately the proposal wasn’t received until 7 days later with no apology or follow-up by the rep.
Our agents aren’t the only ones breaking trust through poor follow-up. The processes we have in place to communicate when customers contact us for help can be responsible for this as well.
- A customer called a local retail store where they had purchased an expensive product that developed major problems after a few months of use. The service rep at the store was very helpful and explained how to submit the claim. A week after submitting she called to check if it was received since there was no contact from the claims center. The rep said yes but the receipt for purchase was missing. No one had told the customer to send this. No one called or emailed to request it.
If we don’t follow-up with customers when we say we will or we ignore them when we learn there is a problem, we are saying, “You are only important to us when you buy or when things are going smoothly.”
What are you doing to insure that your representatives across all channels are providing timely and professional follow-up? What processes have you put in place that help build trust?
It all comes down to making customers feel valued AFTER the sale, not only when they are prospects.