How do you identify and deal with customer irritants?
A customer irritant is any element or interaction that causes frustration or dissatisfaction for a customer during their purchasing journey. These irritants can occur at any stage, from initial research to after-sales, and have a significant impact on brand image and loyalty.
Yet offering the best possible experience is more essential than ever to retain and engage increasingly demanding consumers. That's why in this article we'll look at all the keys to identifying and resolving irritants in your customer journey.
The challenges of managing customer irritants
A study by Accenture reveals that a poor customer experience is one of the main reasons why customers stop doing business with a company:
46% of customers change supplier after a bad experience.
47% immediately cease all relations with the company after a bad experience.
Looking in more detail at the causes of these bad experiences, Accenture has identified that the three main sources of customer dissatisfaction are :
- Having to contact the company several times for the same reason (60%)
- Dealing with unpleasant or rude employees (56%)
- Failure to keep promises made at the time of purchase (55%)
By failing to resolve these sources of frustration, you run the risk of eroding the trust of your customers or potential customers. It is therefore crucial to implement solutions to identify, analyze and rapidly resolve customer irritants as part of a continuous improvement process.
7 examples of customer service irritants
1. Waiting time too long
Customers hate waiting long periods for a response to their request or problem. Long waiting times can lead to increased frustration and a negative perception of the company, driving customers to seek alternatives.
To solve this problem, you can, for example, increase the number of agents available during peak hours, implement an automatic callback system to avoid waiting in line, and use chatbots to handle simple requests and reduce the load on human agents.
2. Unresolved problems
When customer problems aren't solved quickly and efficiently, it can cause a great deal of dissatisfaction. Unresolved problems can lead to a loss of trust and loyalty, and encourage customers to share their bad experiences.
Set up clear processes for rapid problem resolution, and use tracking tools to ensure that every problem is satisfactorily resolved.
3. Automated responses
Customers can become frustrated when they receive automated responses that don't answer their specific questions. Inappropriate automated responses can give the impression that the company doesn't care about customers' individual needs, thus diminishing their satisfaction.
One possible solution is to use advanced AI-based chatbots that are able to understand and answer specific questions. Make sure, however, that a human agent takes over quickly if the chatbot can't solve a problem.
4. Lack of product knowledge
Customer service agents who lack product or service knowledge can annoy customers and tarnish your brand image. A lack of knowledge can lead to incorrect or incomplete answers, increasing frustration and reducing trust in the company.
Provide ongoing, in-depth training for all your agents on the company's products and services, and make easily accessible knowledge bases available to them.
5. Multiple transfers
Being transferred from service to service without getting a response can be very frustrating for customers. Multiple transfers can lengthen resolution times and increase customer frustration, leading them to abandon the service or complain publicly.
Again, make sure you train your agents well so that they are able to solve a wide range of problems. Give them access to a common knowledge base, and use a CRM system to centralize information and customer communications to avoid unnecessary transfers.
6. Lack of empathy
Customers want to feel understood and taken seriously, and a lack of empathy can compound their frustration. A lack of consideration for customers' expectations can make them unhappy and less inclined to continue doing business with the company. Train your agents in active listening and empathy, and encourage them to personalize their interactions to show that they understand and care about customer concerns.
7. Lack of follow-up
Failing to follow up after a customer service interaction can give the impression that the company doesn't care about its customers' satisfaction, which doesn't encourage them to remain loyal.
Set up systematic follow-up procedures after every customer service interaction. You can also automatically send out customer satisfaction surveys to obtain feedback after each interaction and continually improve your services.
Identify and manage customer irritants with Speech Analytics
In a world where customer experience has become a key differentiator, understanding and resolving customer irritants is essential for any business. However, traditional methods of improving customer experience in call centers are showing their limits.
They don't always manage to capture and quantify the full diversity of customer interactions, making it difficult to understand real needs and implement effective action plans. What's more, traditional surveys such as NPS and CSAT often lack the detail needed to fully grasp the causes and extent of customer dissatisfaction.
This is where Speech Analytics, offered by companies like Batvoice AI, comes in. This powerful tool enables you to analyze telephone conversations to pinpoint points of friction. By better understanding the reasons for customer dissatisfaction or frustration, you can not only reduce the rate of customer re-calls, but also improve their overall satisfaction.
One of Batvoice's customers can testify to this:
"We've cut the rate of irritants per call by 19%, and mechanically we've also cut the number of calls by 17%. Overall, on my scale, this represents savings of €300,000. This has enabled us to gain 1 conversion point, or €1.5 million."
- Eric Poueys, Director of Customer Relations Europe at Groupe Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs
Here are three ways voice analytics can transform your management of customer irritants:
- Call analysis: Speech Analytics allows us to listen to and deconstruct customer calls. This technology identifies emotions in the voice, as well as words or phrases that signal frustration, helping to pinpoint critical moments.
- Identify trends: Using advanced acoustic and semantic analysis techniques, Speech Analytics quickly detects recurring sources of dissatisfaction. The tool compiles this information and presents it in the form of detailed reports, making it possible to prioritize the problems to be solved.
- Real-time monitoring of action plans: One of the great strengths of Speech Analytics is its ability to offer real-time monitoring. This makes it possible to anticipate trends, measure the effectiveness of corrective actions and react rapidly to critical situations. Built-in monitoring and alerting functionalities enable continuous performance monitoring, so that strategies can be adjusted accordingly.
In short, Speech Analytics transforms raw data into actionable insights, facilitating continuous improvement of the customer experience. As Vanessa from the Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs Group can testify, she was able to identify and resolve a recurring irritant in their customer journey:
