Great customer service is arguably the linchpin of a successful business. Get it right and you’ll see a positive effect on your sales, revenue and customer loyalty. Get it wrong and you’ll see new and loyal customers alike losing faith in your company, seeking better service from your competitors. Customer insights giant Feefo’s latest survey, which spoke to 2,000 UK shoppers, has revealed invaluable feedback around the two most common service gripes that could be affecting your business right now.
First up is being passed around a call centre – 30% of consumers agreed this was their most frustrating customer service bugbear, with automated voice systems coming in at a close second (21%). We’re currently in an era of digital transformation, where businesses are fighting tooth and nail to streamline and optimise certain processes in the name of customer experience excellence. With this in mind, it is surprising that some businesses are still subjecting their customers to these frustrating and well-known customer service gripes.
3 in 10 people expect a lightning-fast response of no longer than 10 minutes, regardless of the channel they use to get in touch with a brand, and 30% of consumers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. These statistics indicate that businesses must step up their customer service operations up to meet the changing demands and expectations of their customers – especially where we’re now all more online than ever before.
Commenting on the findings, Feefo’s Head of Digital Richard Tank says ‘Consumer confidence and trust is essential to developing an online business that grows, and lasts… brands small and large must do everything they can to build relationships with their customers, to ensure they keep coming back for more. Listening, learning and developing more personalised customer experiences is key to long term success.’
Businesses should be fully interrogating and analysing their own customer data to understand whether these two most common customer service gripes are prevalent within their business, and making the necessary changes to avoid this to, in turn, build consumer confidence.
Every business and customer database is different, so businesses should be ready to discover additional issues that may be affecting their customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty. They must listen, learn and engage consumers at every stage of the purchase journey in order to drive sales and ensure customer loyalty, adopting the latest in best practice to do so, and keeping up with the ever-growing list of customer expectations.
The infographic below illustrates the full set of results from the survey:
