The following customer confidence recovery strategies will help businesses to retain their customers even after they have had a really bad experience. These are simple advises but are very effective, and they work in practice!
- Courtesy: Being indifferent or rude to the customer irrespective of whether you solve their problems or not, could clearly affect the relationship negatively. On the other hand, when employees treat customers with respect, compassion and dignity, they experience a sense of fairness, confidence and justice from the organization.
- Apology: If in the process of serving customers things go badly, apologizing to them is positively linked to their being satisfied with the recovery process. A customer service employee apologizing to a customer communicates courtesy, politeness, concern, empathy, and effort. It is important to offer an apology regardless of whether the fault is the customer's, company's, third-party's or even an act of nature.
- Justification: In customer recovery, justification is a very important but often ignored element. It provides you with the opportunity to explain why or how the problem came about. When you take the time to offer some explanations to a customer as to what could have gone wrong in the service delivery process, it helps the company re-establish trust and confidence with the customers.
- Resolution: A good thing about spoken complaints is the opportunity it offers a company to do its service better – this time as well in the future. Organizations must do everything possible to ensure the problem is fixed and the customer's trust is recovered when they are presented with this second opportunity. And every case shall be analyzed to make it not to happen again.
- Immediateness: According to research, 95% of customers who complain will do business with you again provided you resolve their complaint very quickly. However, if the complaint isn't resolved immediately, the percentage that will remain loyal drops to 75. Moreover, such customers experience very negative emotions in respect of your business and practice it uses and are habitually spreading their negative experience with others.
- Compensation: When there's a failure in service delivery, compensation in the form of a refund, free merchandise, discounts, coupons, product samples and gift cards has been shown to re-establish equity and enhance the satisfaction of customers. Research has also revealed that 58% of consumers who got something in the mail after they complained to the department of consumer affairs were happy, as against 40% of the people who didn’t get anything.
Resolving issues swiftly and adequately presents a huge opportunity for organizations of all types to grow. Provide your staff with the empowerment and skills to resolve issues quickly making use of the six steps outlined here. When such situation happens, you will discover that your staff will begin to regain the goodwill and confidence of customers and more customers are retained.
You may be surprised, but a customer who had bad experience with your company and such difficulty was recovered fast and efficient – such customer may be much more loyal to your company that one who had no complications.
Handing all consumers complains fast and efficient using the simple six rules on how to recover customer confidence we have outlined above brings great results and evidently translates into more profits for the organization.
See more under the courses on consumer behavior and psychology provided by Atton Institute Dubai.