Increasingly, businesses are realizing that top-quality customer service relies heavily on user experience. If a customer has a pleasant experience with a company, that customer is likely to come back for more. If the experience feels awkward or, worse, negative, they’ll not only never return, but they’ll likely tell others about it.

But customer experience extends well beyond checkout and shipment. If customers need help at any point during their interaction with your brand, you have a unique chance to win them over. Even a business with lackluster products can earn loyal buyers when their customer service stands out. Unfortunately, too many businesses rely on outdated systems to provide that help. If your business handles all of its support through email, here are a few ways you may be setting yourself up for failure in the form of lost customers.

Companies Grow

Email-based ticketing systems often go through a single email address, checked by multiple people. This may have been a viable option when a business had only one employee managing the few tickets that came through each day. However, as a business grows, help desks grow, as well, which means businesses need more sophisticated software to manage it all.

Tickets Can Go Unanswered

However incoming emails are handled, businesses will eventually find that at least an occasional email falls through the cracks completely. Not responding to your customers can be deadly for your reputation as a company, since those customers are likely to head online to complain. You may never even realize you’ve upset a customer until you see that negative review, at which point it could be too late to turn the situation around.

Customers May Get Conflicting Information

When multiple employees handle tickets, the same customer can easily get conflicting responses on the same issue. That leads to confusion. Consistency is an important part of providing high-quality service, which means that everyone should work as a team toward conveying the same message to customers. Support software gives employees access to ticketing histories, which ensures they can stay in line with what the customer has been told previously. This also avoids the frustration that comes when a customer is asked to repeat details of the same issue they’ve already emailed about multiple times.

Social Media Is Separate

Businesses can no longer afford to ignore social media posts, yet a Twitter study conducted by Maritz Research found that 70 percent of businesses ignore customer complaints on social media. Email-based resources miss these complaints altogether, leading to online reputation damage. Using software that combines multiple ticketing types with social media posts into one dashboard, businesses can oversee all of the tickets coming in. Items can be assigned to various representatives and expedited to ensure they get a response before they can do further damage.

Customers Have Fewer Options

Customer experience improves when they can get the services they want in the manner they prefer. Some people would rather pick up the phone than place a ticket on a website, while others feel Twitter is a more natural place to reach out to a company. When a business limits its contact options to email, those customers who don’t prefer that mode of contact will be inconvenienced. Understand the reasons to offer multiple communication channels and make sure you set it up so that when a customer calls using one channel, it flows as easily as the other channels.

Every time a customer contacts your business, you have an opportunity to create a lasting impression. By having the right tools in place, you’ll be able to give each customer a personalized experience. As a result, you’ll steadily build a base of satisfied customers who continue to purchase from you.