The Importance of Good Customer Service to Grow Your Business
March 15, 2017
Guest Post by Sara Moccand-Sayegh
Customers are the lifeblood of any business; without satisfied customers you're out of business. A satisfied customer will increase your revenue and increase the positive sentiment of the company. For instance, the White House Office of Consumer Affairs revealed that a dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience.
In my opinion, good customer service involves the company's entire frontline and is about more than just solving problems and offering solutions in an expedient manner. It is also a matter of pleasantness and politeness.
Good customer service will impact the business in four ways.
- Word of mouth
The Groovv infographic "How Customer Service is Impacting Your Bottom Line and Online Reputation" shows that over 95% of unhappy customers never complain, nevertheless those that do complain give the company the opportunity to make them happy. Your customer will probably contact you by phone, live chat, social network or email. In my opinion, it is important that all requests go to one place to ensure better follow-up. Companies are on social networks, have websites with live chat, and use emails. Ideally, you need to centralize everything to ensure that the person responsible for customer support can reply to a customer in the shortest possible time via their preferred channel. Tools such as Five9 allow you to concentrate communication in one place.
If the outcome is positive, this will generate positive worth of mouth promotion.
- Referrals
Growing your client base is essential, and there's no easier way than through referrals.
The main requirement when asking for a referral is that the client has to have a very positive relationship with the company. There will be a certain point when a happy client will praise the company, maybe by speaking with the sales rep, the owner of the hotel, or the waitress in the restaurant. Whenever this happens, it is important to be ready and to ask for a referral.
If you work in a SaaS company it can be very useful to have referrals on comparison websites such as Capterra, G2Crowd, etc.
Referrals and word of mouth are golden, but these are only possible if you have outstanding customer service.
- Decreased Abandonment
In 2011, American Express conducted a survey that showed 78% of consumers have abandoned a transaction due to bad customer service experiences. It is true that consumers have become more used to online shopping, but the abandon rate is still very high. Only good customer service can make the difference. If you give great customer service at every stage of your interaction with your customers, they will buy more of your products. To ensure they have access to instant contact, it is useful to have a live chat. Humans like to speak to humans and resolve the issue expeditiously. This reduces customer frustration; delivers a good customer experience. Here at Saleswings we follow our prospects through each phase of the buying process, providing them the opportunity to ask questions live. This is even more important when you release a new product. When we released our website tracking and lead scoring integration with Salesforce, many people had questions about the product, and it was fundamental to react in time to drive them to the free trial. This was a valuable lesson on customer service, which we applied for our new CRM integration: website tracking and lead scoring for Pipedrive.
- Keeping your existing customer costs down
It is no secret that it is 6-7 times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. Companies therefore have an interest in treating their existing customers well. This is especially true when the company grows. It is so easy for the staff and business owners to feel overwhelmed with increased workloads and changing processes - so much so that they can easily neglect the customers that contributed to the very growth of the business. Nevertheless, this behavior is costly as it results in the need to acquire new clients.
Conclusion:
These four elements generate increased revenue and a positive customer experience. It is inevitable that these days the bottom line of your business is powered by customer service technology. This helps you to follow your customer through the entire funnel and encourage them to move to the next step. This two-way relationship, where customers can contact a company via various channels, brings an incredible commitment and if done right, increases loyalty.
To learn more on how to improve your customer service technology to grow your business, visit Five9.
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About the author:
Sara is digital marketing specialist at Saleswings, a website tracking and lead scoring add-on. The software identifies your most sales ready leads based on their website activity. It analyses past and future visits of your leads and will score their level of engagement/interest.
