At the weekend, I visited a local shop. There was a counter assistant I’d not seen before and in the two minutes that she served me she made so many mistakes, none of them were to do with the till or scanning the products but they were all relating to customer service.
Here’s what didn’t happen:
She didn’t say hello
She didn’t tell me how much I owed
She didn’t offer me a bag
She didn’t tell me how much change I was due
She didn’t say thank you or goodbye, which in turn made me not say thank you or goodbye
Instead, once I left I told three people how rude I thought she was and how I was surprised that she’d been offered a job there. They were very small things but it was the amount of small things that were not done that frustrated me, those aspects in isolation could be forgiven if forgotten, however all contribute to an experience overall.
How you make a customer feel is one of, if not the most important factor for a customer when they choose to buy from a brand.
A recently study by JitBit has identified just how much poor customer service and experience is damaging your profits.
Angry customers – like me – are ‘silent assassins’ with a reported 95% of us sharing a story about a bad experience with a company, with 48% of us telling ten or more people about it. Now, had the lady in the shop realised what she’d not done I’m sure she would have done everything to put it right but as Business Training Works CEO Kate Zabriskie says:
“the customer’s perception is your reality”.
What else did the report discover about how detrimental bad customer service is? Get ready for some hard-hitting stats that will make you want to call an emergency review of your customer service pronto.
It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for a negative one. I need to visit that shop a further 12 times and have positive experiences each time to make up for two minutes of poor customer service. You can see how difficult it’d be to retain a customer if this happened repeatedly.
86% of people will not purchase from a business which has negative reviews.
Why are your customers going elsewhere?
There’s a few reasons but a lot are to do with staff incompetency, demeanour or waiting times.
42% switched to a competitor because staff were rude
29% switched because of poorly trained staff
25% were kept on hold for too long – we can help with Call Queuing Messages
These next few show just how little time you have, to impress a customer or put a bad experience right.
51% of customers will only try to reach support once
78% will bail on a transaction because of a poor experience, whether that be a website issue or poorly handled sales call.
We hate to break it to you but the customer is always right, as a business, you probably think the service you provide is top notch. 80% of companies believe that they deliver superior customer service, however in the customer’s eyes they are way off, with a meagre 8% of customers believing that companies DO deliver superior customer service and only 1% of customers believing that this is consistent.
What do you need to do?
Well you’ve got just over three years (according to the study) until customer experience “overtakes price and product as the key brand differentiator” and retaining your existing customers is a good place to begin, since it’s nearly 7 times more expensive to replace a customer than it is to keep a current one.
Why not get in touch with us to see if there’s anything we can do to advise on your customer service?