Consumer complaints reach a new high in the UK

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According to a recent survey by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS), consumers have complained more about the service they’ve received over the past year, than in any previous year. The survey, carried out twice a year to British consumers showed that 13% of people had made a complaint in the past year. This is up by 2% in the last six months.

Customer complaints - 66 percent tell their friends about poor experience

How do complaints affect my business?

But what does this mean for you and your business? Unfortunately, the answer is ‘a lot’!

Whether your contact centre has 4 or 400 people handling your customer service, the experience they deliver plays a critical role in your brand and service reputation, and a knock-on effect to customer loyalty and referrals. You simply can’t afford to have avoidable customer complaints, especially when 66% of customers tell their friends about a poor experience.

 

Consumers demand for great service

The challenge is that customers now expect a seamless experience everywhere. Whether they call, tweet, email or visit your online chat, they expect the same, excellent, joined-up service and speedy resolution to their queries. Having a streamlined calling experience is great. As is having an instantaneous response on online chat. But unless you have every channel covered and seamlessly integrated your customer is not going to get a tied-up experience.

In today’s always-on, immediately available and highly personalised world, customers expect you to know who they are, immediately understand their needs and deliver to their demands without question. And if you don’t, they’ll go elsewhere with 34% of customers willing to pay more for better service.

 

Customer-friendly solutions

To provide the best customer service and decrease customer complaints, you’ll need to look at your service levels and question several things:

  • Can I manage my call volumes and know how busy my service teams really are?
  • Can my contact centre manage all communication channels from a central place – phone, email, webchat, social, SMS, even WhatsApp?
  • Are my service agents able to view all customer interactions from one place?
  • Can they access the customer’s account, order and service history?
  • Are my team able to easily collaborate or escalate issues quickly to resolve the query?

If you can’t answer ‘yes’ to all of these questions then you need to look at improving your contact centre and service delivery to provide the right experience for today’s consumer demands.

Windsor Telecom can discuss and help resolve these challenges with you. We have an award-winning cloud contact centre solution which gives businesses the ability to confidently handle customer conversations through one single view and intelligently handles queries across agents and channels.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what we do and the value this delivers to our clients, please get in touch.

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