Customer Service Can Annoy Customers

Is your company doing things that annoy customers?

Chances are, with very little probing, you can identify several "little things" that annoy your customers.

Here are 10 Common Annoyances:

1. Billing -- are your individual customers happy with your billing process, procedures and invoices? And not the dollar amount, but the way you do it.

2. Communications -- do your communications match your customers' individual styles?

3. Process – are you inflicting unexplained and/or unneeded processes and procedures on customers?

4. Proactivity – do customers need to prod you to be more proactive?

5. Documentation – do customers ask questions about specifics that should have been documented?

6. Timeliness – do customers need to remind you when something is due?

7. Organization –department barriers exist (to some degree) in most companies. Are yours inflicted on customers?

8. Team shifting – are account or customer facing team members frequently shifted.

9. Errors – who finds the simple errors in everyday work, you or your customer?

10. Voice Mail Limbo - Can customer reach you directly by telephone quickly and easily without being relegated to voice mail.

Annoyance Indicators can be documented in Customer Satisfaction Surveys.

But there is an even simpler way to discover them: Just Ask.

Correcting even the smallest annoyances can DELIGHT CUSTOMERS!