“Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.” – Kate Zabriskie

This quote sums up the importance of customer service quite well. World-class customer service will earn you new customers, help you keep your existing customers, and make them want to tell their friends about you! Bad customer service will compel your customers to spend their hard-earned money on a competing product or service instead. That’s the last thing you want!

Fortunately, I’ve identified seven proven steps that will help you retain your customers—and your profits! The first step is to resolve issues quickly.

Step 1: Resolve Issues Quickly

Here’s a story about one of our FuseDesk customers. His name is John, and he was preparing for a product launch that his team had been working toward for a long time.

When it was ready to go, he advertised with a video sales letter for the product launch and drove traffic to the page, but he and his team were floored by the volume of traffic they got!

To make a long story short…their servers crashed!

Imagine their frustration when they received email after email from customers with credit cards in hand, ready to buy…and no way to do it! In the end, they got over 350 emails!

The Importance of Fast Issue Resolution

Let’s take a step back from John’s predicament and talk about the overall importance of resolving customer issues quickly. This will help us evaluate how well he responded to this server failure issue.

Whenever customers feel they’re not being treated fairly or are facing an obstacle, you have a narrow window of opportunity to turn the situation around.

If you address their issues promptly, you show them that they’re a priority, and you convert negative feelings into satisfaction and loyalty. Conversely, responding slowly or not at all shows that you don’t care. That’s not the message you want to send!

It’s important to strike a balance, though. Responding quickly to fix the issue won’t matter if you don’t actually resolve it, so it’s up to you to balance speed with truly resolving the problem!

Back to John

So, back to John and his situation. How did he react to a downed web page and customer emails? He used FuseDesk’s Bulk Reply tool to rapidly reply to every customer, and in the replies, he gave an update on the situation, a working link customers could use for the order, and an offer for a free gift as an apology for the trouble.

As you might guess, most customers were very understanding and impressed with how John handled the situation, and conversions soared!

The point is, responding quickly and resolving the issue will make customers walk away with good feelings about your company, making them more likely to buy from you again and tell others about you.

FuseDesk offers plenty of solutions for resolving customer issues quickly, including a versatile case management system and so much more.

Check back soon for another step to world-class customer service!

~FuseDesk team