Introduction

When customers contact your business, they rely on your support reps to communicate their issues effectively. If your support reps have poor communication skills, this leads to unresolved issues that can impact business relationships, customer loyalty, and even sales. 

Support reps should be hired for their communication skills: meaning they are empathetic, friendly, and intelligent. They should be able to jump on any channel and communicate effectively with customers, no matter the issue. 

Unfortunately, too often, support reps suffer from missed opportunities to delight the customer. Communication is executed poorly and has customers turning away from your business in droves. We’re going to look at the top customer communication mistakes that businesses make with tips on how to avoid them. 

1. Lack of Personalization

Mistake: Customers expect you to know who they are in customer interactions. Using language that is too general or treating all customers like they are just a number can make customers feel unheard and like your business doesn’t care about them. It’s important to treat customers without the personal touch. 

Examples: Automated responses that lack a personal touch, addressing customers by generic terms such as Dear Sir or Madam, failing to address their uniquely personal situation.

Impact: Customers feel undervalued in their interactions with your business, leading to a loss of engagement and potential churn. In your customers’ eyes, you don't understand who they are or their relationship with your business. They are just a generic customer.

How to Avoid It:

• Use the customer’s name in conversations to achieve basic personalization. 
• Customize your messages based on previous interactions, preferences, and history so customers feel like you have heard them.
• Use a unified inbox to show your customer history so you can personalize your response. 

2. Overloading Customers with Information

Mistake: Some businesses make the mistake of failing to keep messages concise and requiring too much reading. They provide too much information all at once, overwhelming the customer. They fail to summarize the conversation so customers can understand what they need to know without reading a novel.

Examples: Lengthy emails containing too many details, failing to use bullet points or number lists, sending customers to cluttered websites, or using confusing product descriptions.

Impact: Customers can become confused or frustrated, potentially leading to abandonment. They may also fail to read the whole of your message and thus fail to implement a solution, leading to further problems with your products. Customer satisfaction is low.  

How to Avoid It:

• Prioritize the message's key points, summarize the message, and highlight essential information right at the beginning.
• Break content into digestible chunks (e.g., bullet points, short paragraphs) to make for more easily scannable messages.
• Use visual aids like images or videos to simplify complex concepts into a form that customers can more easily understand.

3. Ignoring Customer Feedback

Mistake: Businesses make the mistake of thinking that communication is just one way—business to customer. They fall into the trap of not actively listening to or acknowledging customer feedback, allowing it to fall into a black hole and gather dust. They forget that customers have taken the time to leave their feedback and should be acknowledged. Not responding to feedback shows that your business takes your customers for granted. 

Examples: Ignoring complaints, not responding to surveys, or not following up after a negative experience.

Impact: Customers feel their voices aren’t heard, diminishing trust and loyalty. Especially if the business has solicited feedback, customers can feel disappointed that their thoughts aren’t cared about and will refrain from giving feedback to the business again or even take their business elsewhere. It's unprofessional to fail to respond to feedback and leave a bad impression on customers. 

How to Avoid It:

• Acknowledge and thank customers for their feedback whenever they leave it.
• Take action on responses and use feedback to improve your products or services.
• Respond to complaints promptly, offer a sincere apology, and resolve issues proactively.

4. Using Poor Tone or Language

Mistake: Customers expect empathy from a business when communicating with customer support. Using an inappropriate or unprofessional tone alienates customers who are expecting a representative of your business, not a friend or colleague. It takes skill to match the style of a customer’s communication, but it’s important to always be professional when communicating with customers. This is especially important when customers come to your business with a problem and expect your agents to take them seriously. 

Examples: Being overly formal or too casual, using negative language, or failing to match the customer’s communication style.

Impact: Customers may feel disrespected or alienated, leading to negative experiences when customers don’t receive the tone they think they deserve. They may think your agents don’t know how to solve their problems when they don’t even know how to communicate well. 

How to Avoid It:

• Adjust your tone according to the customer’s engagement style (formal or casual).
• Use positive, solution-oriented language rather than negative, problem-based language.
• Proactively train customer service teams to use empathy and professionalism in all interactions.

5. Delayed Response Times

Mistake: Customers tend to expect an instant response from your business and taking too long to respond to customer inquiries is a black mark in their book. If customers are waiting around to hear from your business this is time they could have spent using your product or doing something else more productive. You might get a bit more leeway with channels like email, but using WhatsApp for business, for example, means customers expect your business to be instantly available. 

Examples: Untimely email responses, lengthy hold times on phone calls, or delayed social media replies that leave users hanging.

Impact: Customers get frustrated with the slow service and may take their business elsewhere for a better response. They may complain about your services online and warn others that your customer service is not up to scratch. Product experience suffers when agents take too long to respond to customers. 

• How to Avoid It:some text
  • Set clear expectations for response times (e.g., “Our response time is 12 hours for email”).
  • Set up a chatbot to offer immediate responses to frequent questions to deflect some of your inquiries.
  • Ensure enough staff coverage to handle peak demand periods.

6. Failing to Communicate Changes or Issues Proactively

Mistake: Customers will forgive a lot if you keep them in the loop about changes in your business. Not informing customers in advance about service disruptions, product changes, or delays is a big mistake businesses make when they could have earned points from customers through proactively communicating changes. Disruptions cause a lot more inconvenience if customers are not warned about them ahead of time, and unwelcome product changes also sting if customers only find out about them when they visit the app. 

Examples: Customers only discover issues after they occur (e.g., shipping delays, app outages, product shortages).

Impact: Customers feel unpleasantly surprised and lose trust in the business rather than being kept informed of changes as they happen. Customers start to have a negative association with your business and consider other providers who will communicate more effectively with them. They start to believe that your business doesn't care about their experience. 

How to Avoid It:

• Share any changes or issues as soon as possible across all channels such as email, social media, or website updates.
• Offer solutions or back-ups (e.g., estimated delivery times, replacement products).
• Be open and honest about delays or issues even if they cause your customer inconvenience.

7. Focusing Too Much on Sales Rather than Building Relationships

Mistake: It’s well-known that existing customers are an important source of revenue, but businesses make a mistake in prioritizing sales pitches over genuine customer service. If a customer has a problem, they are unlikely to want to hear about your latest product or service. They just want to get their issue solved. There’s an art to the cross-sell and the upsell, and your business is just too aggressive. 

Examples: Constantly pushing promotions, upselling aggressively, or ignoring the customer’s needs.

Impact: Customers feel like they just represent another sale to your business rather than being valued customers for the money they already spend. Your business sees them as an opportunity to increase revenue rather than providing quality customer support. Customers aren't ready for an upsell when they simply come to your business for help. 

How to Avoid It:

• Emphasize providing quality customer support over sales tactics.
• Only offer an upsell or a cross-sell if the customer issue has first been resolved and you see an opportunity for increased value.

8. Not Addressing Negative Reviews or Complaints

Mistake: Dealing with negative reviews online can be difficult, but your business misses an opportunity by avoiding or dismissing negative customer feedback in public forums. Angry or upset customers venting their disappointment in your business is your chance to show that you value them as customers and deal with the negative review appropriately and in a timely fashion. 

Examples: Ignoring negative reviews and not responding to complaints on social media.

Impact: Failure to respond to complaints can negatively impact a company’s reputation and drive potential customers away. Customers see that you can’t deal with bad feedback and they start to assume that your business might treat them the same way if they have a bad experience with your company. 

How to Avoid It:

• Send a response to every review within a reasonable time frame.
• If customers report a bad experience, offer a way to fix it or offer compensation. 
• Take all complaints as constructive feedback, and never, ever delete bad reviews.

9. Not Using the Right Communication Channels

Mistake: If businesses aren’t using the right software like Glassix, they can end up using the wrong medium to communicate with customers. This means that the customer support channel you choose will be inappropriate to that particular customer and, worse still, lose information that customers sent on a different channel. Businesses that aren’t using the appropriate software have poor communication with a high volume of customers - they can't handle the load. 

Examples: Sending a wordy email when a text or phone call would suffice, using social media for posts containing sensitive information.

Impact: Choosing the wrong communication channel negatively impacts the customer experience. Customers may not appreciate or respond well to your chosen communication channel. They may not think well of your business and struggle to find a convenient solution to their problem. 

How to Avoid It:

• Invest in a unified inbox solution like Glassix to make it easy to switch between channels.
• Find out customers’ preferred communication channels early on and use them.
• Adopt multiple channels for customer support in your business. 

10. Failing to Follow Up

Mistake: Customers don’t take kindly to radio silence. If customers interact with or purchase something from your business, you should follow up with them to find out about their experience. Even an automated email is better than allowing customers to complete their interaction without a follow-up, but many businesses let customers leave without bothering to learn more. 

Examples: No follow-up after a customer service call or after the purchase of a product.

Impact: Customers think that your business doesn’t care about them or doesn’t have the time to learn more about their experience. Customers then feel neglected, which could lead to churn or missed opportunities for future business. They move on too quickly to their next interaction and forget about your business, which has missed an opportunity to foster engagement and provide delight. 

How to Avoid It:

• Always ask customers for feedback after any interaction, especially following up on a purchase. 
• Thank them for offering you their business and providing post-sales support. 
• Make use of customer satisfaction surveys to find out how you can improve your business.

Conclusion

Businesses can make many mistakes when communicating with customers, from using the wrong channel to coming across as too salesy. It’s a fine, delicate balance to tread between being open and transparent and overwhelming your customers with too much communication. 

It’s important to foster positive and productive customer relationships through effective communication. Customer service is closely tied to the customer experience, and offering a better experience will likely result in happier customers and more sales. 

Continuously evaluate your communication strategies and invest in training, tools, and processes that support effective communication. Ensure your customer service team is well-provisioned to provide the best communication possible.