The coronavirus crisis has changed our lives in countless ways. Depending on where we live, we may be shut in, missing family and friends, kept from our workplaces, favorite restaurants, movie theaters and more. Even shopping - whether for essentials like groceries or specialty items - has become a new experience, with customers and staff wearing masks, stores mandating limits on number of people in stores, and businesses operating with far fewer staff members. The result has been far longer lines - whether to get into a store, to talk to a customer service rep, to get service for a broken appliance, or to meet some other household need.
Though the queues are totally understandable, it doesn't change the fact that they are stretching the patience of people who are already stressed. If you own a business, you need to do what you can to make the waiting experience as pleasant and non-irritating as possible.
Not sure how to do it? After taking a look at the businesses that are doing it right, as well as the ones that are the subject of consumer complaints, we've put together the following list to help you keep your clients as happy as possible - therefore hopefully keeping them as your clients for years to come.
If there's anything worse than waiting in line, it's waiting in line without having any idea how long you are going to be there. As off-putting as it might be to hear that you have a 45-minute wait ahead of you, it is far better than being on hold for that long and constantly being amazed that you're still there. If a consumer is told that they will have to wait 45 minutes, they will make use of their time. If this is a phone call queue, they'll put the phone on speaker and do something else.
Today's technology allows you to provide dynamically updated call/chat wait times for those who are contacting you via phone or online, and if you have an in-person line to get inside your store or to prepare a take-out order, have an employee stroll back through the line every five minutes or so to thank people for their patience and update them on approximately how long the wait will be.
Some people are willing to endure the wait, while others find it intolerable. For the latter, having alternatives can make a world of difference in their experience and how they feel about your business. These alternatives will depend upon the type of business that you operate and your available technology: you may want to give people the opportunity to skip sitting on hold and instead leave a message for you to return their call, or to send an email instead of waiting to speak to customer service. If your website is capable of hosting online chat, you can offer preset answers to keywords in questions, and have multiple chats assigned to a single online customer service rep so that you can cut down your queue more quickly.
We've all been through the experience of waiting on hold forever, only to finally reach a live human being who quickly tells you that they can't help you and you need to speak to another person. Sometimes this requires hanging up and calling a new number. Sometimes it means being transferred - and potentially having the call dropped in the process - and sometimes it means being put on a whole new hold. Instead of subjecting their clients to this level of irritation and frustration, try empowering your employees to pursue the answers to questions completely so that customers walk away from the experience with a sense of satisfaction, and that the time that they spent waiting was well worth it.
Depending upon your business and industry, there are a variety of ways to accomplish this level of productivity. You may want to use an internal communication line that allows your customer service reps to send instant messages to each other to boost a problem up the line of authority or knowledge without passing the client around. You may need to provide your employees with the ability to dedicate themselves to individual problems rather than rewarding them for handling as many clients within a shift as possible. Whatever way you do it, you'll give your clients a strong sense of having an ally inside the organization, working to solve their problem.
This may seem obvious but is too rarely enacted. If you take the time to analyze the customer service issues that your clients are having, you are likely to find that you're being asked the same questions over and over or fielding the same complaints. If you post the answers on an FAQ, incorporate the answers within the body of your ordering process, and address the repetitive problems that your clients are encountering, you eliminate the need for your clients to contact you in the first place.
If you are realistic and acknowledge that your business will always have clients on a queue for one reason or another, you can move forward to find a way to improve the experience. Though you may be more directly focused on important issues such as improving sales, keeping your employees safe, and how you're going to transition your business into a COVID-19 ready operation, you need to acknowledge that providing efficient customer service is a big part of those strategies. By offering excellent, attentive customer service and minimizing client displeasure or irritation, you will be able to maintain your client base, and may even grow it as people share their experiences with one another.
About Martinez & Shanken, PLLC
Martinez & Shanken, PLLC is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) firm based in Gilbert, Arizona. We provide a full range of accounting, bookkeeping, consulting, outsourcing and business services. Partners Deborah Martinez and Earl Shanken work to ensure your business accounting is done with integrity and to your satisfaction.
