The Customer Strikes Back

No, it’s not the title of the next movie in the Star Wars series. It is part two in a three-part series from Accenture on customer service in the technology industry. The survey mentions several review sites such as epinions.com, theconsumersreview.com, resellerratings.com, and gethuman.com. Are they effective? The report states that:

“According to Henderson research, there are now more than 25,000 websites dedicated to poor customer service, and there were more than 100 examples in the past year of actions individuals took to virally communicate their displeasure via the Internet resulting in a company’s changing its policy.”

Average customer service is not good enough. The report findings show that there is a direct relationship between how satisfied customers are with the service they receive and how likely they will be to continue to patronize a provider. According to report “only about one-fourth of customers said that they would buy again from a company that, in their minds, provides only average service, and just 19 percent said they were likely to be more loyal to such a company.”

Service is more important than innovation. According to a customer service survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Verint Systems, consumers overwhelmingly prefer good customer service over the hottest, most innovative product offerings, and most consumers will tell others about their customer experiences – whether bad or good. Some 88% reported that they find a company with good customer service much more enticing than one with the new and innovative products.

The take-aways:

1. Be sure to gather customer feedback about your customer service and know that good enough, isn’t.
2. Add customer service to your competitor analysis, and include website customer self-service tools in your analysis.
3. Monitor consumer review websites for feedback about your business and your competitors.
4. Take all your customer feedback seriously, even if you only get a few responses. Many customers will not directly tell a company about their experience, so be sure to both clarify and quantify any issues that get reported from customers.