Importance of Customer Service to any Business
Having worked in Customer Service (CS) for over 12 years, I will be sharing the values and know hows of providing Premier Customer Service. In fact, I am a Certified Facilitator for my company, via Achieve Global, so I will be sharing over the next few weeks the concepts used while Facilitating several sessions regarding CS. Ever since working in CS, I have little to no tolerance for bad CS as a customer. I get frustrated with companies that do not value CS. Although I have read several articles about companies, such as Zappos.com, that are recognizing CS as a means to building loyal customers and moving away from the idea that CS is simply a “call center”. Loyal Customers is key, always have and always will. So how do companies build customer loyalty? By delivering or providing “STELLAR SERVICE”! I will describe exactly what stellar service looks like in later posting, but want to first go over some very fascinating facts about customers:
- It costs a company an average of 5 times as much to attract a new customer as to keep an existing one.
- On average, dissatisfied customers tell 10-16 people about their negative service experiences.
- It takes about 12 good service experiences, for a company to overcome a single bad one.
- 91% of unhappy customers won’t buy again from the company that displeased them.
- Of customers who switch to a competitor, up to 80% say that they were satisfied before make the switch to the other company.
The last fact most people find confusing. But it simply states that 80% of customers switch even if they were satisfied, or their expectations were met, with a company’s product or service. In order for a company to be successful, they need to exceed client’s expectations. These are amazing facts that most companies either ignore or simply are not aware of. All these facts lead to the importance of building customer loyalty.
In my next posting, I will go over the “Four Benefits of Customer Loyalty”.
