Why Is Customer Service Important?
Customer service is critical for maintaining revenues, retaining customers long-term, and improving staff morale.
Customer service is important for an obvious reason: when customers feel good about their experience with you, they are much more likely to buy from you again. And this, in turn, increases your business’s revenue.
Returning customers are considerably more profitable than new ones. Research shows that acquiring new clients costs about five times as much as retaining an existing one. And increasing retention by just 5 per cent can potentially boost profits between 25 and 95 per cent.
However, there are some slightly less obvious (but still common sense) reasons why customer service is so critical for your enterprise. Here’s a rundown:
It Turns Clients Into Brand Ambassadors
All successful businesses, even giant companies, rely on word-of-mouth marketing to grow their operations. When their customers do their marketing for them, the process is cheaper and more effective. (Prospective clients are much more likely to listen to their peers about the quality of a product or service than the company trying to sell it).
By far the best way to create brand ambassadors is for companies to offer great customer service. It’s what sets them apart from the competition and enables them to generate an emotional connection with their audience.
It Builds Customer Loyalty
While customers aren’t as loyal as they were in the past, most will continue buying from you if you treat them well. The trick here is to treat them like royalty. If you can delight them and make them feel like they are important to you, their psychology will change. They will look beyond the economic realities of your relationship with them and choose you based on emotional reasons. This switch makes it much easier for you to preserve your margins.
It’s An Easy Way To Add Brand Value
In addition, offering exceptional customer service is a great way to add brand value. Being polite and putting the customers’ needs first is much easier and less costly than, say, developing new product features or innovating your technology.
Furthermore, it can create positive synergies. When customers have better experiences, it improves your brand’s reputation. This change in perceptions then gives your employees pride in the firm, encouraging them to offer even better service, and so on.
It Reduces Turnover Costs
In the UK, employee turnover costs approximately £11,000 per person, depending on the role. That’s a huge expense, equivalent to around 40 percent of the median salary.
Employees leave for various reasons, but one is unpleasant interactions with customers. Workers dislike it when angry clients rant at them about the quality of service.
Fortunately, there are solutions. Click4Assistance’s live chat for businesses automatically redacts expletives and other offensive messages. It also comes with a ghost-typing feature. This addition lets operatives see what users are typing into chat before they click send, giving them more time and context to deal with issues. Once customer service improves, clients become happier, and employees don’t have to bear so much of the brunt of their attacks.
