How Easily Businesses Can Reduce That Cost, But Don’t
As Halloween approaches, we’ve been thinking about what truly scares businesses. Perhaps the most frightening reality for a business is the true cost of bad customer service. While most businesses know that they can, and most certainly will, lose customers to even just one bad experience, they may not think about the true cost of poor customer service.
Check out these scary statistics:
- Businesses lose $75 billion annually to bad customer service (significantly up from $13 billion in 2016)
- A staggering 86% of customers leave a business due to a poor experience
- Gaining a new customer is 6 to 7 times more expensive than retaining a current one
The thought of going out of business because of the mind-numbing cost of bad customer service may be frightening to business owners. But what’s even scarier is that this can be prevented with some strategy and tools to implement those strategies, and they aren’t doing it. Even the businesses that focus on the importance of providing an excellent customer experience, many of those businesses still fall short, In fact, a mere 10% of companies actually deliver on the experience they promise.
Fortunately, any business can guarantee each experience their customers receive is an exceptional one with these simple tips:
Remember the Basics: Be Available to Your Customers
Customers know that with so many means of communication available, getting in touch with a customer service representative should (and can) be easy. Customers have more options to reach out to a business than ever before, so whether it’s through the phone, email, or chat, customers expect to be able to talk to someone fast! The longer it takes a customer to obtain assistance or info on a product, the less value they will put into that product, the company, and the more likely they are to walk away altogether.
In fact, 51% will only attempt to reach customer service one time before abandoning a purchase. And the next step after that is usually complaining about that business on Google reviews or social media. Inevitably, this discourages potential new customers from even considering buying from that company. That’s why it is imperative that no matter how customers communicate with a business, there should always be a representative available and willing to assist them.
Remember to Train Your Agents to Listen
Once customers are able to connect with someone at a company, the next step is ensuring they receive competent and friendly assistance. If agents are not able to provide this, the results can be detrimental. In fact, studies show 73% of customers feel rude and unhelpful employees play a large part in a bad experience.
One easy way to prevent this is to consistently train agents to actively listen to customers. This ensures that they provide each customer with the desired outcome. But many agents find themselves lacking the knowledge they need to make successful changes. Fortunately, using a call monitoring solution can help supervisors provide their agents with clear examples of where their performance may need improvement.
As a result, agents can effectively handle any situation in a courteous and professional manner. This is just one way to help guarantee every customer-agent interaction is a truly positive one.
Don’t Just Listen – Act On Customer Feedback
A successful business not only gathers information from their customers, but it also acts upon it. Customers are invaluable sources of how a business can improve, but only 4% of customers will actually verbalize their dissatisfaction to the business. Many businesses use tools, such as surveys, but the lack of response makes it difficult to implement effective changes.
The consequence is that businesses lose the opportunity to improve their service and products. But businesses can obtain insights into their customers by implementing a speech analytics solution. With speech analytics, businesses can quickly scan every single phone conversation with customers for specific words and phrases.
Businesses can then uncover certain patterns and trends and convert this raw data into improved business strategies that truly reflect the customers’ wants and needs. When the voice of the customer is heard and answered, customers feel appreciated by a business and receive a superior experience.
Still Scared of the Cost of Bad Customer Service?
While a poor customer experience can cost a business, a good experience can have some great benefits. 80% of customers claim they would spend more for a better experience, and just a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits anywhere from 25 to 95%. Also, 77% of customers say they would recommend a company if they had a good experience with it.
It’s clear that delivering the best customer experience possible does not have to be scary, and businesses should do all they can to make this end a reality.
