Bad customer service experiences have a significant effect on your customer loyalty and brand perception.
With the importance of customer service today, it’s no longer enough to give your staff customer service tips and expect that great service actions will take place. Customer service in the call center clearly needs help.
This week’s infographic comes from the team at Virtual Hold Technology, a startup that provides multi-channel callback solutions for call centers.
The Virtual Hold team recently conducted a consumer study that shows that there is still a clear disconnect between what companies today claim to offer and the experience that customers report they get.
Although the results show that there is still great room for improvement in the service center, it’s encouraging to see that when done right, customers are responding positively to the efforts of service providers.
The Big Customer Service Disconnect
Although organizations are beginning to take positive steps to improve the experience their customers get, continued emphasis needs to be placed in developing service delivery in alternate customer contact channels.
The study findings reveal a big customer service disconnect: while organizations increasingly say serving customers is a top priority, consumers are not seeing improvements even at the most basic levels.
Customers today still struggle with the experience that companies are offering. This should make organizations everywhere immediately take time out to review their service levels and measure results from the customer’s perspective.
Take the following key troubling facts about service experiences.
- 96% of those surveyed report they have to repeat information (account details, explanation of issue, etc.) to call center agents. Whatever happened to intelligent and contextual call routing?
- 64% of customers will hang up the phone if having to wait more than 5 minutes on hold. 91% hang up if forced to wait over 10 minutes on the phone.
- 87% of customers say that apathetic or uncaring call center agents create a negative customer experience.
While phone remains the most popular form of support, this preference is gradually shifting to other channels, e.g., social media, mobile. Everybody’s talking about multichannel support yet as consumers, we know multichannel implementation remains a rarity.
Good customer service pays back in customer loyalty
The shift in how the customer interaction takes place shows that customers increasingly demand that businesses be more proactive about service. Companies that can organize their service activities and ensure that they contribute to a positive customer experience are being rewarded with fantastic customer loyalty.
The data is encouraging for organizations making an effort to get customer experience right; 90% of customers say that a positive customer service experience will increase loyalty to the organization.
