A Study Details The Importance Of Customer Service, With Ineffectual Examples Leading To Customers Moving Elsewhere

A new study reveals that customers are incredibly unlikely to recruit further services from a brand if they’ve faced even a singular bad experience in the past.

Sure, everyone likes to talk about how fickle customers are, but then again so are brands. I suppose it all depends on perspective: if we talk about a small business, then a customer’s impatience can be very trying; if we’re referring to a massive conglomerate, then such annoyances are more than justified. The former usually involves a small team of self-made individuals where occasional human error is more than likely to occur. The latter involves a brand that’s based its entire business model upon exploiting the masses, so the grievances are more than acceptable. I’d further ask everyone to at least not be aggressive or untoward with regards to the actual frontline retail workers, but I’m positive these words will go unheeded by at least a quarter of the individuals who read this.

The study was conducted by Invoca, a conversation intelligence company that heavily relies on AI to build conversation models that its clientele can then rely upon. They recently conducted a study on the importance of customer service during a consumer’s interaction with a brand. A total of eight different industries were taken into the mix, and five hundred individuals were asked to take part in a survey, serving as the sample population. Their answers were then compiled into the study set before us; now, let’s delve into the results and see what we can glean.

So, right off the bat, the importance of good customer service is underlined by just how quickly consumers abandon a brand if it’s not provided well enough. 76% of the sample population stated that they would discontinue a vendor’s services if even a single bad experience was encountered. This puts the onus on customer service reps to control a customer’s experience as much as possible, either ensuring that effective service is provided or putting out fires whenever problems arise. Bad experiences for the most part involve rude agents (59%), long hold times (58%), or customer service reps transferring consumers amongst different lines too much (58%). Pretty sure I know at least four major banks that are guilty of that last one.

A lot of customer service has moved towards either online platforms or the phone; with 68% of the sample population stating that they make a phone call at some point in the purchasing process. 85% of the current population also expects businesses to keep some record of past interaction, such as recalling if an individual has called before and remembering certain details of a prior transaction.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World