Bad Phone Experiences Result In Negative Online Reviews!
Like it or not, online reviews influence your prospective clients. And, if you think your business can ignore online reviews and risk providing a poor customer experience, then think again! While you’ve probably heard the saying that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”, but when it comes to negative online reviews, that kind of publicity can directly affect sales — negative reviews decrease sales. A 2011 Online Influence Trend Tracker survey found that 4-out-of-5 consumers changed their minds about a purchase after reading a negative online review. Bad online reviews and social media chatter hurts any business, small local ones will suffer the most. You could be losing customers without knowing who they are or why they chose a competitor.
Once a customer leaves your business, they’re likely to contact you by phone with any questions or problems. If they hang up angry or frustrated, they’re likely going to type about it on review sites such as Google, Yelp, etc and also take to social media. Ultimately, you need to have strategies in place to help protect your online reputation. Part of that equation is to avoid rubbing salt in the wound by making a bad situation turn worse due to poor customer phone experiences! Heck, there’s even an entire community dedicated to voicing their dissatisfaction with bad customer telephone experiences called onholdwith.com
Providing a Good Customer Phone Experience is Crucial.
Remember that a majority of your customers want to talk with a live person. You may even be surprised to learn that even the younger generation still prefers to contact companies by phone but they hate having their time wasted. This is one area where many businesses, especially small businesses, often stumble.
At some point, your customers will be placed on hold, it’s unavoidable, so rather than giving the dead-silence, or monotonous music, use that time effectively. A creative on hold messaging strategy can help eliminate customer impatience and frustration by providing relevant information that engages and helps them, while reducing the frustration of long wait times. I mean if you already have an unhappy customer, a bad phone call just adds fuel to the fire, and before you know it there off on Yelp, social media or some other platform to announce their displeasure.
How to Gain Positive Reviews When Providing a Better Customer Phone Experience.
If you’ve implemented an on hold messaging system to help provide a better customer phone experience, and are working to avoid situations that lead to bad online reviews, you can also use that time being proactive and recruit customers to act as ambassador’s of your brand and generating “positive” on line reviews from your customers.
By filling on hold time with useful and engaging information, combined with excellent customer service, use that moment to be proactive and by reminding happy customers to take to Google, Yelp, or your social media and sing praises of your brand. Plus, not only does providing good customer phone service just make sense, but you can GET MORE REVIEWS, especially on Google, which will in turn, also help your SEO and therefore help our business be found by potential customers.
So with reviews in mind, its interesting to read that statistics show “67% of consumers read up to 6 reviews online”. With “90% of consumers that read favourable reviews online say that it confirmed their purchase decision”. Now you know how online reviews can be for your business, and we hope that you will look into getting a message on hold system, to improve the customer phone experience and get your online reputation moving in the right direction – today!
