Why Your Support Matters as Much as Your Product

When customer support leads to success

When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, he directly realized how crucial customer support is. At this time, online shops did not want to deal with returned products and therefore made it almost impossible for customers to send products back, whereas Bezos knew that making it easy would bring customers and assure their satisfaction and loyalty. Just take a look at Amazon’s logo, the arrow looks like a (customer’s) smile and goes from A to Z, which means that Amazon is taking care of customer’s satisfaction all along the process. Disrupting the idea of online customer service was one of Bezos' vision that ensured the thriving success of his company.

How poor customer service is bringing businesses down

Having customer-centric support services can lead businesses to thrive while poor customer service is amazingly harmful to profit and companies.

According to a study conducted by Gartner, the average company receives 1 million calls a year, 30% of customers have to face difficulties solving their issue and among this 30 %, 81% have a bad opinion of the company they have called: at the end of the year 243,000 people are unsatisfied with the customer service. And this is certainly not over, things are going worse because these 243,000 people are going to tell at least 10 people about their bad experience: now 2,430,000 people have a bad perception of the company at the end of the year.

Now let’s take social networks into consideration, our 243,000 unsatisfied people have on average 303 friends on Facebook, one post will reach 103 people: you end up with 25,758,000 additional people having a bad opinion of the company. At the end of the year, you have 28 million people that might not buy your product at all because of 243,000 unsatisfied people.

Moreover, according to the Gladly 2018 Customer Service Expectations Survey, 26% of surveyed consumers will switch companies after one bad customer experience, it can be with your support agents but also with your product or anything.

Investing time and resources into customer services is worth it

Customer service should be seen as an opportunity to stand out among the competition. Companies are not only selling shoes, computers, phones or software, but they are also selling their expertise and service and that’s what people really buy. According to the Gladly 2018 Customer Service Expectations Survey, mentioned in a Forbes article, 54% of the surveyed consumers purchase because of the customer service and 19% see it as the most crucial factor when buying something. Therefore having proficient customer service is vital for a business and investing into it is largely rewarding: 80% of the surveyed customers will recommend a company after one good consumer experience.

Having a good consumer service is playing a major role in customer loyalty because clients will have no reason to switch companies if they are overall satisfied. But as their expectations are growing, companies should provide their customers with a service beyond their expectations, especially in highly competitive sectors with little innovation. A study lead by Microsoft in 2019 stressed that in the USA, customer service is very important to the choice or loyalty to a brand to 66% of the people. Therefore it cannot be neglected.

Investing in support is profitable since - according to Gladly’s study - a third of your customers is willing to pay 1-9% more for better customer service and 8% are willing to pay 20% + more.

What do customers expect from the support service?

Support is an experience as a whole. People expect to find the right level of information by themselves and if to have somebody available to help them in case they don’t. We built Stonly to improve user experience at each stage. Stonly helps creating interactive step-by-step guides that can be used to:

Improve users self-service experience by providing contextual and interactive guides where relevant
Transfer the information about
Train agent with scripted guides to improve how they can help customers

Learn more about Stonly here.