What’s one of the major reasons customers leave one company for another?
Many studies show the same conclusion. It’s estimated that business lost due to poor customer service ranges in the billions of dollars⁽¹⁾.
In a 2016 study conducted by Accenture⁽¹⁾ two-thirds of customers said they had switched providers in one industry due to poor service.
In their 2020 study, they also found that last year alone around half of the customers who had experienced poor service had shifted a portion of their spend to a new provider.
It’s not just existing customers that care about customer service – potential new customers care too. In Deloitte’s⁽²⁾ 2016 Consumer Review, they found that over half of consumers say that the overall enjoyment of their experience is important in their decision to buy a product or service.
However, it seems many businesses and their employees still don’t understand the importance and impact of customer service.
This is an alarming finding. If employees don’t believe that customers switch due to poor service, will they be motivated to provide satisfactory service to those customers?
We started digging to see if these employees’ underestimation of poor service’s impact was due to low investment in customer service training by management. Customer service training would help explain the importance of it to their employees, and give those customer facing employees the specific skills they need to be able to provide a satisfactory customer experience to customers. So, are the businesses our respondents worked for investing in this training? We found their investment was nowhere near enough.
Of our survey respondents, 25% had received no training at all. Nothing. No product training, no communication skills training, no customer service training.
Even more alarmingly, more than 50% of respondents had never received training on customer service basics, such as product knowledge, or how to handle rude or difficult customers.
And finally, a huge 77% had never received training on how to offer any sort of “make good” to a disappointed customer. “Make goods” are usually offered to customers who have experienced delays or issues, and come in many forms: partial refunds, discounts on future purchases, or something for free. However organisations choose to approach this, they should be training their team on how to deliver it.
These results are even more alarming in the context of a post-COVID-19 world. Accenture 2020 Customer Research⁽¹⁾ shows that digital disruption has caused a steady erosion of customer loyalty. This is expected to increase as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to push more consumers online, bringing forward digital trends at eyewatering rates.
If you’d like to invest in customer service training for your team,
you can visit Canity’s training library.
For results of other surveys conducted by Canity, click here.
If you’d like to speak to us further about how Canity’s online customer service training platform might work for your organisation, contact us here or browse our Training Library
To review other research findings visit https://www.canity.com/resources/californian-customer-service-survey/
Published by Canity