What is Good Customer Service?
Here’s a scenario: you’ve read all the white papers and watched all of the webinars and you’re convinced. You need to make providing great customer service a top priority. So you hire a support team, build out a great support infrastructure, and … now what?
Buying into the importance of customer service is the easy part. The difficult part is making it happen. First and foremost, you need to understand a few things:
1. What is good customer service?
2. What is bad customer service?
3. What effect will providing one or the other have on my company?
With the help of Dimensional Research, we conducted a study to answer those very questions. The results, while sometimes surprising, ultimately back up what we’ve been saying for a long time: providing your customers with great service can pay dividends that are far-reaching and long-lasting.
Dimensional Research interviewed more than 1,000 consumers to try and understand what defines a good customer service experience, the ways customers reward companies that provide it, and all of the ways a customer will broadcast (publicly and privately) their experiences.
Good Customer Service Defined
One of the more surprising results of the survey was the way people defined good customer service. It might seem like a given that most people would list achieving their desired outcome as the most important factor. The single most important factor was this:
“The problem was resolved quickly.”
OK, so clearly the customer getting their way would be the second highest rated factor, right? Nope. Here it is:
“The person who helped me was nice.”
Makes sense, nobody likes to be treated poorly. The customer getting their way has got to be the third most important factor for good customer service. Wrong again:
“The problem was resolved in one interaction—no passing around to multiple people.”
Less than half (47%) of those interviewed indicated that the customer service interaction was positive because they got what they were originally hoping for.
What Does That Mean for You?
When you provide your customers with great customer service:
- 81% tell their friends and family about it
- 45% broadcast their experiences on social media
- 35% will write about it on review sites like Yelp
- 52% will continue to do business with your company
- 39% will choose you over your competitors for up to two years!
What Does It All Mean?
Your customers are reasonable: they don’t expect to always get their way, they just want fast, convenient service. And they want to be treated with a little respect.
Consider An Intercom Alternative: Kayako
Read the full report: Lifetime Customer Value
