Poor customer service is a terrible business. In the United States alone, companies lose nearly $ 700 billion in revenue due to poor customer service. The reasons can be many. Poor (self) insight can be an essential factor. It must be said when 80% of companies think they provide superior customer service, while only 8% of customers believe the same.
One way companies have tried to solve poor customer service has been to introduce a chatbot. But it has, so far, not solved the whole problem. In 2020, Kantar presented a report which showed that customers experienced that the chatbot only managed to solve 20% of the inquiries, while the companies themselves reported a resolution of up to 80%.
How can the discrepancy be so significant? And does it matter how big the difference is? After all, the most important thing is to measure customer satisfaction from the customer’s perspective.
It is the customer’s experience that is the truth. And the truth is, if we believe Kantar, that 80% of today’s customers want to find answers to their questions on their own – without contacting the contact center. Therefore, the digital solutions must deliver on the customer’s requirements and expectations; on your website, chatbot, social media, or the contact center.
If you also do not have reasonable solutions for receiving and handling these customer inquiries across channels and customer journeys, the overall customer experience will be abysmal.
To ensure that you can create the excellent customer experiences that your customers today expect, you will need insight and analysis to take the temperature of your contact center.
The consequence of not delivering on the customer’s expectations will be costly.
If we believe Gartner, 80% of your future sales will come from 20% of your existing customers. At the same time, these customers are worth ten times more today than the first time they shopped with you. At the same time, they will tell nine others about their customer experience.
80% of your future sales will come from 20% of your existing customers
New customers will therefore cost between 6 to 7 times more compared to retaining an existing customer. And as that is not enough, only a 5% increase in customer loyalty, through good customer experiences, can make the customer up to 95% more profitable.
On the other hand, dissatisfied customers will tell about the bad customer experiences. And what’s even worse is that very few will ever tell you about these experiences. In other words, what you do not know is potentially very painful.
Most people I have met agree that good customer service is good for everything from the brand, sales, customer loyalty, internal pride, and brand. A well-positioned brand is good for the bottom line. And a good bottom line is good for the “stayer ability.”
At the same time, it is a bit strange, on the verge of disappointing, that so few deliver good customer service – and then throughout the customer journey.
Good customer service is about the time before the customer trades, during the purchase process, and after the transaction has been completed. A B2B perspective often involves many interfaces and channels across multiple people in the business who need to be addressed with your products, goods, or services.
Therefore, you depend on being available to your customers where they want to contact you., whether it’s via the phone, email, chatbot, or social media. And if a customer reaches you on social media, the customer experience quickly becomes terrible if you demand that the contact be transferred by phone or email. Then the road to a competitor is also relatively short.
Today’s customers demand a contact center that can handle all dialogue regardless of platform and channel. A contact center that handles the customer’s question or problem regardless of whether the dialogue moves from one point of contact to another.
Omncius has focused on precisely this since day one; by gathering all the touchpoints, customers can contact your business in a unified platform. This makes it efficient and seamless to link the different ways customers have contacted you in a simple visual way. Furthermore, it creates a perfect basis for creating unique and repeatedly good customer experiences over time.
If you do not believe me, then just book a demo, and we will show you how we can help you realize customer service the way customer service should be!
This blog post was first published on the Omnicus blog.