Today most buying and selling happens over the internet, due to which there is very little one-on-one contact between buyers and sellers. Customers can access most of the information pertaining to the product or service on the seller’s website. Customers are well-informed about all the details of the products and services they are buying. Having good customer support in place is more important than ever and cannot be forgotten.

In fact, with a surge in the availability of all sorts of products and services over the web, expectations of consumers have largely increased and so have the complaints or queries related to these. Therefore, businesses need to make sure that they employ all the necessary tools and a good customer service team to handle the complaints, concerns and queries of customers.

Moreover, they also need to make sure that these issues are resolved in the best way and in the least time possible. Because “if you don’t care about your customers, someone else will”. So if you do not value your clients by solving their troubles, the chances of you losing business to a competitor are quite high. And if this gets repeated, you may unknowingly build a bad reputation in terms of customer support services.

But despite knowing all these pros and cons of an efficient and effective complaint resolution mechanism or to say, a customer support service, many companies seem to be paying no heed to this, including some of the big shot business houses of the world. Here is an example to prove the point:

Complaints and issues reported to Amazon customer care since a few months have recently been reported as left unresolved or not properly resolved. There are many such examples on the internet.

It is high time that the companies take this issue of customer satisfaction seriously, else they will face heavy losses in the near future.

Even researches have clearly shown that most of the customers do not even bother to complain but simply walk away. So it is imperative that companies immediately provide favorable solution to those customers who atleast care to complain. A study has shown that 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favor.  Many studies and researches are carried out frequently to bring out the facts and statistics about customer experiences that every enterprise should know.

In order to keep pace with the rapidly changing scenarios, focus should now be shifted to following customer happiness rather than mere satisfaction or complaint resolution. There are many tools and services available to make that happen. Besides a proactive customer support team, one or more of the following tools can be of great use for sellers who frequently need to deal with customer complaints.

1. Co-browsing- A remote representative can help consumer to find information or product on the seller’s website by co-browsing the site.
2. Video Chat- We depend on the internet, the importance of live face-to-face communication cannot be ignored. Using high quality video chat software to conduct a one-way or two-way video chat can be a great way to resolve consumer issues.
3. Interactive content sharing- Sharing documents, images, or videos with customer can also help up-selling.
4. VeriTalk- The support feature by VeriShow, in which this application allows executives to co-browse and share offline content with customers by exchanging a unique random Assistance ID, while the agent & customer can connect on traditional hand-held phone voice-call.

Warren Buffet, one of the most successful businessman has rightly said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently”. This quote itself should be a great inspiration for all the businesses to start paying attention to customer problems. As technology has changed the expectations of clients, it has also brought many new, innovative, easy to implement and cost effective methods, tools and applications for creating a strong customer support system.

Have you not started using any of these yet? Now is perhaps the right time to do it!