80% of businesses believe they provide “superior” customer service, but only 8% of customers would describe the service as great.
When your customers aren’t satisfied, there’s real damage that they can do to the long term success of your organization. Maybe you can stand to lose one or two or a few dozen, maybe even a few hundred customers, so what’s the big deal? But think of it in terms of the long term trend for your organization.
How long can your business survive while consistently losing customers?
“Be nice to the customers you have, and you’ll win the customers you want.”
-Shankman|Honig
A customer saved is a penny earned, customer retention in customer service
The following infographic from Shankman Honig, a customer service consultancy firm in New York, shows how focusing on better customer service and effective customer service results can lead to higher profits and a better customer experience.
My take on why customer experience in customer service matters
You may be acquiring new customers every day, but every new customer you bring on has a cost your organization pays. That cost is often times many more times than the customer will spend within the first year or first transaction that customer completes. The lifetime value of your customer to your organization is central to the long term success of your business.
Lifetime value is a key metric in the strategy of today’s competitive business landscape. In order to maintain the highest lifetime value for your customers you need customers to continue working with you over and over again. Customer retention is a critical component to an effective customer service program and key in demonstrating that your customer experience strategy is on the right track.
Some key statistics stand out and reaffirm how critical getting customer experience right really matters when you have to differentiate yourself through experience and customer service.
55% of customers cancelled a purchase or transaction because of a poor customer experience.
You’ve already spent the resources to get them to your “door” and now you turn them away because your door is unappealing, uninviting, or downright unwelcoming. By focusing on improving the customer experience, even the most modest efforts can begin to make a difference.
Imagine if you could make a slight change and keep even 10% of those who would have left? What kind of effect would have have on the bottom line of your business?
Customer frustration have nothing to do with your product
You’d think that most customers who are upset feel that way because your product failed to live up to the expectation. Wrong. Often times customers are ok when a product underperforms, but they expect something to be done. That’s when we really go wrong and turn dissatisfied customers into angry, revenge-seeking, social media black marks on our brand.
What irks customers the most?
- Deception
- Rudeness
- Incompetency
- Inflexibility
- Lateness
Great customer service is a better way
There’s a better way to do business today. Empower customer service to make a difference. Enable a leader in your organization to begin focusing and working to change your customer experience for the better.
On average 67% of customers would have stayed and continued to do business if their concern was resolved during the first contact with the business.
Moreover, 85% of customers who switched to a competitor would have stayed if the business had simply acted different to prevent them from switching.
A whopping 66% of customers are actually willing to pay more to do business with a company they believe provides excellent customer service.
You don’t need to do more. You need to do better.
Most of your customer service people actually want to make a difference. They want to treat customers right. If you were to ask them what they would have done to prevent a customer from switching to a competitor and by far you’d see that they know what it takes to make things right with the customer. The problem is that too many policies stand in the way.
The answer is less policy and more guidelines. Less restriction and more enabling of our customer service people to do what is right for the customer.
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