May 26, 2015 - By 
Strong research on the impact of customer experience on the bottom line from SAP, Forrester, Deloitte, Accenture, Gartner, and Harvard Business Review can be a great starting step towards winning buy-in from leaders and executive on the need to invest in customer service.
It doesn’t matter that you have read all the blog posts and thought pieces and case studies and are ready to re-conceptualize the way your company engages its customers.
It doesn’t matter that you have a solid sense of how to restructure things to better provide your customers with an exceptional experience when they interact with your company.
Until you get the green light from your organization’s leadership, major changes like these are simply not going to happen. So – what can you do to expedite that green light? Here are four tips that should help facilitate that conversation.
1) Present Data on the Impact of Service
Data should always be your first line of defense (or angle of attack, depending on how you think about things). Just be sure the stats you cite are applicable to your industry!
Here’s a great list of 100 stats that can help you make the argument that your company should be paying more attention to the customer experience model of customer service. And here are my 8 favorites:
- 40%of customers begin purchasing from a competitor because of their reputation for great customer service.
- 39%of customers avoid vendors for 2+ years after a bad experience.
- 20%of “satisfied” customers intend to leave the company.
- 62%of customer service organizations view customer experience as a competitive differentiator.
- 67%of organizations view improving the customer experience as one of their top three priorities.
- By improving the help section on your website, teams can reduce calls by5%.
- Giving customers quick tutorials on product features before hanging up can reduce churn by 6%
- Training reps to respond to customers who have given low marks on surveys can increase resolution rate by31%.
2) Put it in Terms They Understand Very Well: Revenue
According to the 2014 American Express/ebiquity Global Customer Service study:
- 68% of customers are willing to spend more with companies who provide superior customer service.
- 60% of customers have walked away from a transaction because of poor service.
If you want to increase revenue, you need to create happy customers. If you want to grow exponentially, you need to create zealous brand advocates. You don’t get zeal from a “satisfied” customer – you need to provide exceptional service to your customers and prospective customers in order to enjoy exceptional evangelism from them.
3) Remind Them of the Nature of Competition
Industry leaders care about competition because it represents the “bandits” that will “steal” their market share (and boy does that sting when it’s your existing customers that are choosing to use those competitors). Those bandits are taking shots at companies that don’t realize that their market is craving something that they are not yet providing.
What aren’t they providing? Maybe it’s a cheaper price, maybe it’s features/product fit, maybe it’s the experience of doing business with a great company (check out the ongoing saga of Ryanair for an example of customers changing providers based on the experience of doing business with you, or of course, the archetypal customer experience story with Zappos).
If you are not winning market share based on price and you are not winning market share based on fit, your only option (other than packing up shop) is to try to win market share based on the experience of doing business with you.
4) There’s No Shame in Name-Dropping
When all else fails, you can always point to the likes of SAP, Forrester, Deloitte, Accenture, Gartner, and Harvard Business Review and to what they have to say about customer experience.
If they told you to jump off a bridge, you might not jump – but you’d certainly explore why they advise it.
