This is the second post in our blog series commenting on the recent study by Dimensional Research on The Impact of Customer Service on Customer Lifetime Value
A recent survey of mid-sized company customers showed a strong and direct correlation between customer service levels and future spending (83%), especially in B2B transactions. Here are some specific highlights of the study regarding the impact of good and bad service encounters:
Impact of Good Customer Service on B2B Sales
62% purchased more products or services
58% would recommend company to others
48% considering another purchase from that company
Impact of Bad Customer Service on B2B Sales
59% overall stopped buying from that source
55% switched to another provider
40% recommended to others that they should not purchase from that source
In other words, as I discuss in my customer service keynote presentations, the spin from any customer service encounter is tremendous. Let’s just do a little math using these statistics with some hypothetical numbers:
Let’s say average B2B transaction for a company is $500 and there are 100 transactions in a week. That would give us $50,000 in sales per week or $2,500.000 per year. If we gave bad service in just 10% of those transactions, and those 59% stopped doing business with the company, that would equate to a loss of $147,500 potential future business ($2,500,000 X .10 X .59)
Conversely, for every happy client in this business, they generate hundreds of dollars of repeat and referral business potentially generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional business and income.
Your transaction level may be bigger or smaller than the one used in my example. It really doesn’t matter. Here is the question: Are you willing to lose 59% of ANY number you are working so hard to generate? I would assume not. Thus it is baffling to me why businesses do not spend more money training customer service staff on how to be business builders instead of business destroyers for their organization. The cost of lost business and the potential added revenue of incremental and referral business makes this a no brainer business decision. All the marketing dollars in the world are a wasteful spend without a staff ready to serve and please customers. And as we learned in an earlier blog post which looked at a JD Power study, pleasing doesn’t give you near the results that DELIGHTING does.
Is any of this rocket science? No – it’s just common sense. But as you and I are frequently reminded in today’s business world, common sense just isn’t that common any more! Opportunity for business growth is waiting. Are you and your staff ready? If not, I would be happy to have a discussion with you on how you could improve your positive customer service spin and build your profits!
(To see other posts in this blog series on the Dimensional Research study referenced in this article, please go to www.AllenSpeaks.com/blog)
