Here are the five biggest reasons customers will walk away from you — and how you can avoid doing what makes them so angry.
Customers can be relatively forgiving creatures. They’ll get over a product or service failure that is fixed in a timely fashion.
But some situations are beyond relationship repair, according to a recent survey published by Shankman-Honig.
Customers admitted that they’d leave their service or product supplier if the company or one of its employees was:
- Deceptive — 78% would walk away if what was delivered was different from what was promised
- Rude — 77% won’t put up with impolite customer service or sales professionals
- Incompetent — 71% won’t buy again if they have to contact customer service several times for the same reason
- Inflexible — 71% won’t come back if policies, returns and warranties are confining and inflexible, and
- Late — 65% will hang up and never call back if they’re on hold or waiting for help too long.
A better way to act
To avoid issues that might cause a mass exodus try:
- Regularly checking that online and written promotional literature is in line with what Service can deliver
- Hiring front-line service and salespeople with positive attitudes, and train them to know your products and services
- Providing continual training — at least once a month — to ensure employees can solve issues on the first contact
- Reviewing policies and agreements that affect customers periodically to determine which are the most contested or hinder reps from doing their jobs, and then take steps to bend or eliminate them, and
- Being more responsive by training staff to answer calls within three rings, emails within two hours, social media and texts within a half hour. That’s how quickly customers expect help.
