Effective Communication Tools to Help Turn a Poor Consumer Experience Into a Repeat Customer

No business owner wants their customers to have a negative experience. Unfortunately, sometimes lines get crossed in communications and some customers end up walking away unhappy. However, if you find yourself losing customers due to negative customer experiences, it doesn’t mean that you can’t bring them back by turning the situation around. People want to be heard, so if your company provided a negative experience—or if the customer felt it was negative—listen. By taking a look at effective communication tools, you can help turn those negative experiences into regular customers.

Create an Opening With an Answering Service

One of the best ways to turn around a customer experience is to start from a more positive place in the future. A good answering service will allow you to get vital information out to your consumers when they pick up the phone and route their calls to the places where they need to go. This reduces the amount of time customers spend waiting and allows you to make sure they can actually be helped.

Provide an option for customers to provide feedback—either negative or positive—and have someone ready to speak with them about it. The employee taking these calls should be empathetic and capable of dealing with potentially emotional callers. They’ll also need quick problem solving skills so that they can try to offer an alternative solution to customers who feel they have been wronged. When a customer feels they are being heard and that you are going out of your way to help them, you can help build loyalty, even from an originally negative experience.

Invest in Chatbots for SMBs

Sometimes the best way to interact with a customer is to give them easier access to what they need. A chatbot designed for a small or medium business allows consumers to ask simple questions and receive quick, factual answers, which can then allow customers to make more informed decisions. Chatbots for SMB are a great way to immediately answer those simple questions that often annoy customers and that unfortunately can end up at the bottom of a support queue. This might include questions about business hours, location, return policies, and other business procedures.

If a customer’s question is more involved and can’t be easily answered with pre-programed answers, your chatbots should be able to direct the customers to an employee who is more equipped to help them.

Make It Easy to Keep in Touch

Some questions do need to be answered by humans and nothing is more frustrating than not knowing how to get in touch with a business. Investing in simple contact forms on your website not only makes it easy for a customer to send you a message, but it eliminates the step of requiring them to go back to their own email programs to do so. If you can combine this with an automatic email reply service, you can get at least some questions answered much more quickly.

It’s also useful to provide other contact information on your site as well, such as relevant email addresses, phone numbers, or physical locations. Providing multiple means of contact allows clients to choose the one best suited to them, which will help decrease any frustration they might be experiencing.

Interact on Social Media

Finally, remember that your customers aren't always going to come to your business or to your website to get in contact with you. Investing in a strong presence on social media will allow your customers to get in contact with you while they're going about their days, eliminating some of the annoyance that can come with contacting customer support.

Upset customers may also complain about a company on social media without ever contacting the company directly. This can affect other potential customers and bias them against your business. However, by responding professionally and positively to poor reviews and offering solutions, you can turn individual and public opinion back in your favor.

Don't be afraid to turn things around with customers who have bad experiences. Learn what upset them and do your best to fix the problem. Invest in communication tools to help facilitate and respond to feedback. While one bad interaction can feel like the end of the world, you can turn it around and make it a positive learning experience for your business.