To provide customers with a great experience, it’s important to make sure they have the opportunity to interact with us as corporations – and that means being available to your customers. But for some reason, we seem to take the automated approach to our communication protocols, thinking that is going to save us time and money, when in reality, avoiding the customer has the potential to cost us in lost sales and customers.
Think about the methods we’ve put in place over the years at our places of business to avoid interacting with customers:
- Self-checkout lines
- Voicemail
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages
- Omitting the company address and phone number(s) from websites
- Automated attendants
- Self-pump gas lanes
- Administrative assistants who screen calls and emails
- ATMs
- Toll-road E-ZPass scanners
As consumers, we’ve gotten used to not having access to living, breathing employees in the stores and businesses we frequent, and this has contributed to a host of issues that have a strong impact on the customer experience.
[tweetthis]There is a real danger in removing ourselves from customer contact.[/tweetthis]
Avoiding your customer doesn’t give you the chance to:
- answer all questions the customer may have about your products and services;
- tell the customer how much you enjoy working with them;
- cross-promote other products and services; and/or
- discover how you could do a better job of serving your customers.
And it doesn’t give your customers the chance to tell you:
- how important you are to them; and/or
- what your competitors may be up to.
To avoid frustrating, angering, inconveniencing or minimizing your customer, be available to them. It lets them know how important they are to you. Mystery shop frequently to ensure that your phones are being answered and that your employees are up-to-date on their product knowledge and available to assist your customers when they need it. Ensuring this will pay big dividends in terms of your profitability.
Have you ever automated an aspect of your organization that you wish you hadn’t?
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