The brand equity of your business needs to be built over time, but it can quickly erode away due to a few bad customer exchanges

The life expectancy of brands has taken a stark opposite when compared to the trends of human life expectancy. Even as the human life expectancy has soared across the globe, a successful brand today is expected to last a mere 18 years compared to the 90 years of 1935 (according to a McKinsey study).

For sure, the pace of innovation and technology has played a significant part in this drastic change. But customers’ perception of a brand also plays a significant part at cutting-short or extending the lifespan of a brand.

Today, the various digital channels offer immense opportunities to drive positive customer interactions. At the same time, a bad interaction can potentially cause your customer go away with a negative impression of your business and tempt them into choosing your competitors’ offering.

In this article, we’ll discuss the different possible mishaps that could happen while managing your digital interactions. We’ll also explain how you can prevent those accidents from ruining your all-important brand equity.

1. The speed of resolving issues trails behind the inflow of issues

When you run a business, you are always handling an inflow of customer queries. This could be at the rate of a trickle to an all-out avalanche. Even if your team mismanages a single customer interaction, it has the potential to blow-up into a nightmarish PR situation.

In order to avoid such a situation, a business should be able to satisfactorily resolve a large number of issues within a limited time span. Otherwise, you could have a situation where you are always trying to resolve a backlog of pending customer inquiries. In this situation, it could get hard to have satisfactory answers for even the simplest of customer queries.

Also read: Encouraging your customers to be your brand advocates

Here are some of the tricks to speed-up the customer interactions and avoid accidents:

Having an optimized workflow to manage customer assignment
Easy transfer of each issue to the right individual
Ensuring that each issue gets resolved within a specific time limit

You need to have an optimised system to manage customer issues to achieve these objectives.

2. Service reps giving away vague answers to customer issues

Today, when a customer raises a problem, they expect to immediately resolve the problem and move on with their life. In this situation, both the service rep and customer benefits by giving-out the earliest resolutions to their problem.

If your team gives-out vague answers, it could potentially throw cold water over any possible future relationship with the given customer.

For this, you need to provide precise and actionable resolutions to every customer problem on a regular basis.

In order to manage successful brand communications, the service team needs to practice using digital tools to effectively communicate and collaborate to resolve each customer problem. By offering quick satisfactory resolutions, you can improve the overall customer goodwill for the brand.

3. Losing the confidentiality of customer data

The confidentiality of customer information shared with the business has come under scrutiny in recent times.

As you may know, we’ve recently seen multiple big brands failing to maintain the confidentiality of their customer data. Giant internet brands such as Facebook and US credit accrediting firms such as Equifax have got singled-out for violating the confidentiality of the user data.

This has led to a situation where the customers feel insecure about sharing their data with businesses.

At the same time, this could be a great way to build the customers’ confidence in your brand. The longevity of the brand depends on ensuring confidentiality of the customer data.

In this situation, the brands should be able to collect and track the flow of data within a secure fool-proof system. By having a system to effectively track and check-on the access to business data, you can prevent any wrongful access to your customer data. This will also help you accelerate the overall speed of your associated business operations.

4. Being unable to understand your customers

In the present market scenario, the audience is constantly changing their aspiration or preferences in terms of product choices.

In order to be successful, you should possess a sharp ear to listen and understand the different audience inputs. Also, you should understand what’s most important to the majority of your customers.

This requires a data-informed way of understanding and prioritising your user requests.

For this purpose, you can practice managing all conversations through a unified platform. This allows you to collect, segregate and prioritize customers’ needs, enabling the business to amass a more engaged customer base.

5. Missing-out on possible social conversations

Rather than industrial conferences or meet-ups, social media channels are where you can have real conversations with customers. This can drive positive engagement across the board by having high-quality social conversations.

Also read: 4 lessons in building a community around your brand

At the same time, social media has the potential to go much beyond the casual customer conversations. In case your customers are not content with a particular aspect of your business, social media channels are the first place where those opinions will pop-up. You can use these as a feedback management system to instantly prioritise and resolve your most critical problems.

An effective social media communication and engagement strategy bring these multiple advantages to your disposal. If you don’t have an effective social media communication strategy, it could potentially lead to a large communication gap between the brand and your customers.

Conclusion

A 21st-century brand thrives on creating and maintaining positive perceptions in the minds of their customers. Any of the above mishaps can seriously damage the brand equity of any business. Even if you are managing increased volume of customer interactions, you should take measures to maintain the quality of customer interactions.

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