Your incident communication with the customer service team may be leaving money and reputation on the table!

We are living in the age of customers, and although nothing is more cliché than this statement, you need to accept that it is an absolute truth. After all, the market is highly competitive and digital, and therefore customer expectations are at the center of business strategies more than ever, since it is precisely people’s experiences when they interact with your brand that determine its success or failure. And, with your permission, I will allow myself some didactic excesses and even some redundancies in this article, because I need to reinforce that good customer experiences simply do not exist without good communication with customers. Communication is a basic condition to understand their needs, solve problems, provide accurate information, and create a relationship of trust, essential elements for a positive and satisfactory experience. Now I will raise the weight of this good communication because I start to talk about customer service, where it is one of the most crucial skills, vital I would say.

Here I will make a special cut to talk about incidents, which may be one of the most critical points in communicating with customers, because lack of punctuality and precision can destroy any service experience and pulverize the brand’s reputation. When we talk about an incident, we can think of critical and unexpected situations, not even by customers or the service team, a quite explosive mixture. Imagine thousands of customers losing access to the final of a football championship where their favorite team is playing, calling the customer service center of their streaming provider, and hundreds of people in service without knowing what is happening, without being able to give a precise and convincing answer? Imagine thousands of other people trying to extract the income statement through the application that stopped working on the last day for sending the income tax return, calling the customer service center of their Bank and talking to attendants who do not know what happened and cannot inform the solution deadline? Do these seem extreme situations to you? I can affirm, in more than 20 years working in the service world, that they happen much more than you imagine, practically every day and with all brands. When an incident occurs, whether technical or security, the ability to communicate quickly and accurately is vital. The lack of effective communication can result in misinformation, customer frustration, and ultimately significant financial losses for the company. Customers leave, period. The competition lives very close, and they have the moving truck parked in front of people’s houses, with the doors open and offering all kinds of help to take them to their domains. Incidents happen and will continue to happen. Rains knock down poles, power is cut off, streaming stops working because it depends on it, and football championship finals are lost. People leave their income tax returns to the last minute, systems are not always sized to support large volumes of simultaneous requests, and they stop working as they should… and I’m here talking about the two examples mentioned earlier as chaotic, but every day we see a lot of others. Once again, this applies to all types of companies, from small to large. If there’s one thing I can say with absolute certainty that my journey to this point has been able to build, it’s that the difference is in communication. If all have inevitable problems, a large part of them also accumulate a totally avoidable problem: imprecise communication and delayed information.

Incident Communication: an undoubtedly essential pillar
Imagine a critical system is down. Your customer service team needs to be aware of the problem immediately to inform affected customers who will inevitably contact by phone, chat, email, or social media. But how to ensure that your entire team receives and understands the message at the same time? Without a robust and centralized communication platform, this task becomes almost impossible. Management, over time, has always stacked useless attempts to do this efficiently. I’ve seen everything, from the outdated wireless phone, with desperate supervision trying to communicate with your team, person by person, to sophisticated speaker systems spread throughout the service center with someone trying to communicate with people who are wearing headsets (headphones with microphones used for call handling) listening to and talking to customers. What’s the chance of that working well, considering the quality and timeliness of the communication? Low chance, believe it.

When incident communication is underestimated, the pains soon appear:

– Information disseminated late or inconsistently;
– Negative impact on customers, who are left without information or with inaccurate information;
– Complaints on social networks, specialized sites, ombudsman, or government regulatory agencies;
– Loss of company reputation;
– Depending on the severity or recurrence, the feared but avoidable, churn.

As I mentioned before, we are in 2024 and many companies still depend on outdated and scattered methods to communicate incidents. Emails can be ignored or lost, instant messages may not be seen in time, and emergency meetings may be impractical. These methods do not guarantee that the message reaches the entire team efficiently and uniformly. If this is your reality, it’s time to look for specialized technology. If you do the math right, it can be much cheaper than the financial and reputational impacts your brand may be exposed to. Another challenge of these methods is traceability. How to guarantee that all team members have read and understood the message? How to manage the frequent updates of an ongoing incident? And, crucially, how to document who received, read, and acknowledged the message? Do you have this data available in your company? If the answer is yes, it is a relief, your company is connected to the age of customers.

Technology as an ally
An online and timely communication platform can radically transform how incidents are managed. With it, you can ensure that:

– The incident is communicated immediately and clearly;
– All team members are notified simultaneously;
– The message is highlighted on the screen, requiring the person to click to read and register that they are aware;
– Updates of new events are integrated into the same incident communication;
– Adherence management is possible, allowing you to know exactly who accessed, read, and acknowledged each update.

The costs of inefficient communication
Do not underestimate the damage caused by inefficient incident communication. Providing incorrect information to customers not only decreases trust in the company but can also lead to severe legal and financial consequences. Furthermore, the lack of accurate information can prolong the service time and generate callbacks, increasing the negative impact. Let’s test how your incident communication is in your company? Answer some questions about it:

– How does your team currently communicate incidents?
– How many times has incorrect information been passed on to customers?
– What damages have already been accumulated due to ineffective communication?

If your answers revealed significant flaws in your incident communication strategy, you urgently need an efficient solution. And, of course, I would like to invite you to have a chat with our team of specialists and learn about the incident management of the Weduka platform. This tool was developed to address exactly the pains discussed. In a customer service world where information is power and effective incident communication is essential, I recommend that you do not let the lack of adequate technology compromise your team’s efficiency, your customers’ satisfaction, and your brand’s reputation.