More Than Half of Customers Would Pay More for an Excellent Customer Experience

Most of us spend a lot of time yelling into the telephone nowadays, often trying to get around a poorly designed auto-attendant with imperfect speech recognition skills. If your blood pressure doesn’t rise the fifth time you hear, “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that,” you’re probably super-human.

While there are many column inches written about the importance of excellent customer service, many companies seem to be paying lip service to a great customer journey. When it comes to backing it up with effective action, these same companies are often nowhere to be found.

As it turns out, customers value a good experience so highly, they would pay for it. In its 2022 Achieving Customer Amazement customer service research, Shepard Presentations found that more than half of customers surveyed – 58 percent – indicated that they would pay more if they knew they would receive great customer service.

“The overall conclusion is that price is less relevant when customers know they are going to receive better service or have a better experience,” wrote Shep Hyken, “Chief Amazement Officer” at Shepard Presentations, for Forbes. “It’s not that customers disregard price altogether, but you can’t ignore that more than half of your customers are saying, ‘Please take care of me, as in give me a better customer experience, and I’ll pay a little more.’”

The willingness seems to show some variation depending on age demographic. The study found that younger customers are more willing to pay for better customer support (62 percent of millennials and 60 percent of Generation Z said they would pay, versus 46 percent of Baby Boomers, and as usual, everyone forgot to ask Gen-X).

Customers today are big on convenience, and the disjointed, uneven, and even contradictory experiences they receive from channel to channel are causing them to discontinue doing business with certain companies.

“While you should still be competitive, you don’t always have to be the lowest price,” wrote Hyken. “And depending on the industry, you’ll have to experiment to find how much more your customers are willing to spend. You can start by talking to your customers and finding out what they value most.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle