If you’re looking at your budget and considering cutting back on
support for customer service, you might want to reconsider.
About 96 percent of unhappy customers don’t take the initiative to tell you they’re unhappy with your service, but they will tell nine
other people and not return.
Customer service should be as important to you as it is to your customer, and customer service is second in importance only to product quality when it comes to satisfying customers.
The difference in today’s market is that brand loyalty isn’t what it
used to be. Businesses are making a new promise every day without
credible reasons for the consumer to believe the promise.
Customers make purchases because they believe you’re selling
something they need, but they also know they have many options. A
single bad experience with you can result in your customers making
purchases from the guy down the street next week. The products
may be similar, but the quality of your customer service can be why
they prefer to make purchases with you.
If customers have a good experience with your business, they’re
more likely to return and spend money again. Positive word-of-mouth is one of the cheapest and most effective means of growing
your business. It’s also much less expensive to retain a customer you
already have than to attract new ones.
“The quality of your customer’s experience is one of the most
important sustainable advantages a company can have, particularly
in a competitive environment,” says Andy Bodea, senior vice president of global operations for Equifax Inc. “Senior leadership must be
behind the initiative in order to provide the right tools, and all the
elements of providing customer service need to be adopted throughout the company for it to work well. It’s OK to admit that you’re not
perfect with customer service, but you should have an execution
focus on how to make it happen.”
Customer service in today’s market entails doing business where
and when your customers want to. The trick is to cut costs while
being flexible with your ways of improving customer service quality across all avenues, including online and by phone.
There’s an easy formula for this, yet it’s not utilized. It starts with
paying better wages. Then you have to invest in your employees’
ability to perform through education and train them to respond to
customer needs.
