Difficult Customers Can Be a Nightmare: How To Effectively Handle Tough Customers

Customers are golden assets to your business but there are some that prove to be very hard to handle. Let me explain: those customers that will always complain of a small issue or even when there isn’t much to complain about.

In fact, difficult customers force you to develop a decision of giving up on them and moving on with others who are better. But you also need these customers because some may be one of the biggest clients you’ve ever had. And losing them would lead to a huge financial loss to your business.

Look at this:

According to New Voice Media report, poor customer experience is costing US companies over $62 billion to their competitors’ pockets every year. Worse still, when the customers were surveyed, 39% revealed that they will never work with the offending business again. Why should you allow losing out like that?

Here’s the deal: with the right help desk software, you can be able to handle all customers including those with the worst behaviors.

Here’s how to handle difficult customers:

Respond Timely

Customers hate waiting and late replies annoy them and force them to move on to other brands with a short response time. So, you should quickly answer their questions promptly and this limits customers complaints about your service.

Guess what? Even if the customer has the worst behaviors but his or her questions get answered quickly with relevant answers beyond his expectations. The difficult customer won’t have a chance to complain. Why? Because you’ve given him or her a satisfying experience with your business.

Furthermore, responding to angry customers is challenging, however, sometimes the angry customers are looking for empathy. Here’s what I mean: they might only need your take on a bad experience they might have had with your business.

For example, according to a study by Harvard Business Review, an angry customer who receives a mere response to his or her query increases his or her willingness to pay for your products/services.

Well, provide your support team with the best IT ticketing software that enables them to timely receive and respond to customer tickets.

Solve Customer Issues

You must not only welcome customer complaints but also solve the issues raised. Make sure you find solutions to their problems in order to remain on good terms with the difficult customers. Because remember, if you don’t solve their issues, they spread their bad experience with others and this affects your business’s reputation.

By the way, most of these difficult customers are tough because they need their issues solved and it’s the only way you can calm them down.

Here’s the good news: with an ticket management system, every customer ticket on the main ticket list can be seen in the shared inbox by each support team member. So, not a single customer ticket is left unsolved.

Best of all, if the issues of the difficult customers are handled, they come back for more of your products/services. Thus, acquiring them for long term and boosting more sales for your business. For example, a study by Glance reveals that 70% of your angry customers reveal that they are in a position to buy from your business again if their issues are solved.

Use ChatBots

Bots are artificial tools to handle your customers when your support team is away or busy with other customers. Bots are always present 24/7 to serve your customers and once programmed to handle customers in a particular way; they always stick to that.

So, tough customers are worked on in a friendly way as bots don’t have feelings and despite the customer’s poor behaviors, he or she is handled well. Moreover, the tone of answering the customers with the use of bots remains calm no matter how harsh the client’s response is. Thus, this calms down the difficult customers as they are engaged with a machine which is immune to rudeness.

As a matter of fact, according to Ubisend’s 2017 chatbot report, 57% of UK consumers are familiar with a chatbot, 37% of consumers look forward to seeing more businesses embracing chatbots. And 21% reveal that it’s the easiest way to engage with a business.

What does this mean? Chatbots are popular in the market and chances are high that your customers will embrace them.

As if that’s not enough, according to Gartner, 85% of customer service interactions by 2020 will be powered by chatbots. So, the future of customer service lies in them.

Provide A Self Service option.

With a customer service software, you win an opportunity to scale your customer support and provide a self-service option to your customers that hate interacting with customer service representatives. This saves your support team from dealing with some tough customers because they end up helping themselves out.

On the other hand, a help desk software helps you to identify frequently asked questions from your customer’s tickets and create relevant answers on a page on your website. This is where some of your customers find the relevant answers if they don’t want to deal with the support team.

So it’s not surprising that 70% of customers today expect a self-service option on most business websites. Why? Because they want the power to solve issues on their own. Customers want to be in control that they can find an answer to any of their questions with just a simple Google search.

Winning Tough Customers

Difficult customers may not be as tough as you think, however; they might be having either some personal problems or have had a bad experience with your business at that moment. And this can be solved. Because by the time they come to your business, they already have an interest in your products/ services. So don’t give up on them and try improving on their experiences except if it’s beyond your control.

The problem might not be with the customers but with your support team, products or services. Listen to their complaints, be friendly and look for possible solutions to their problems with the right help desk app and they might turn out to be your best customers.