Call Center Management Featured Article
Study Finds Good Customer Support is a Competitive Advantage
Here’s something to think about it: how many times have you tried a new business – a restaurant, a doctor’s office or a store – and found that your first few experiences were very good? Perhaps they impressed you with customer support, knowledgeable workers and the ease of interacting with them. You may have been so impressed that you shared your good experience on social media. A few months later, it happens: a lousy experience. Perhaps the store or restaurant was understaffed. Perhaps the doctor’s office was overwhelmed and screwed up your prescription. Whatever the driver, it tarnished your initial good feelings about the business. You may have even shared your disappointment with friends and family, or left a bad review on Yelp (News - Alert).
While everyone has a bad day now and then, for companies, the consequences are serious. At some point, you’re going to disappoint your customers. It’s what you do from there that will make the difference.
A new research report by NewVoiceMedia (News - Alert) uncovered the fact that American businesses are losing $62 billion per year through poor customer service. Despite the fact that companies are aware that a great customer experience is vital to the health of a business, this figure is more than triple the estimate from 2013, which was $20 billion in loss from lousy customer service. More than 2,000 adult respondents in the U.S. told NewVoiceMedia that 49 percent of respondents reported switching to a competitor in the wake of a bad experience, and of those, 67 percent switched more than once.
“It’s not hard to figure out the implications of this,” wrote Forbes’ Shep Hyken. “If you don’t provide a good customer service experience, someone else out there is going to gain half of your existing customers. For many companies, the big problem is in the customer support center. And it’s not just phone calls. Today, there are multiple channels that customers can use to reach out to the companies they do business with.”
Customers are using them, too, turning to other channels such as instant chat, email, social media and self-service solutions. What they’re finding is that many companies are not really supporting these channels in a meaningful way. Emails go unanswered, social media posts are ignored and self-service solutions go around and around with no solution and no ability to escalate to a knowledgeable live agent.
American businesses are in cost-cutting mode, as they have been for several years. It’s tempting to cut back on customer support, since the benefits are often intangible and hard to pin down. How much is customer goodwill worth? What’s our return on investment if we attempt to improve our Net Promoter Scores? How far can we push customers with long call queues, wrong answers and unanswered social media posts?
While it may be hard to attach numbers to these questions, it’s not hard to see the impact poor customer experiences have on a company.
“Even if your company doesn’t have a customer support center, you are not immune from losing business due to bad customer service,” wrote Hyken. “Every statistic and fact out there indicates that service gives any company a competitive advantage, and the lack of it can be the demise of the business.”
So how do you prevent a formerly loyal customer from fleeing to a competitor? For starters, do your best to make sure you’re not handing out lousy customer experiences. If you can’t always get that right, make sure you have a process in place to identify where you are failing and make it up to your customers.
Edited by Alicia Young