6 Reasons To Not Neglect Your Customer Service

By Katie Bromley, Director Corporate Communications

• Your customers deserve excellent service
• Your customers expect excellent service
• Your customers should be your biggest fan

• People are influenced by the recommendations of their peers
• Good experiences contribute to brand loyalty
• Customer service can be a profit center

Those first three reasons are not new but need to be repeated. Daily. Emblazoned on a plaque in every contact center. Embroidered on a pillow on an overstuffed couch. Tweeted twice a day with a picture of a sunrise.

Loyalty

What is the easiest way to create a great customer experience to hopefully help brand loyalty? It is listening and offering personalization. As written in a recent Forbes article, really hearing the customer and their challenge, and responding quickly, directly and smartly, makes all the difference to the experience a customer may have.

Influence

A recent blog by my colleague Liz Pedro quoted a statistic from the 2016 B2B Buyer's Survey Report that stated 62% of buyers rely more on peer recommendations than anything else. Frankly, I find that low, especially if it's a negative recommendation. Don't you?

Impacting the bottom line

As customer experience authority Jeanne Bliss says, "If you want customer experience to be just another silo or a cost center, do it the way you've always done it."

Customer service has evolved a lot in a short time. One of the biggest groups of consumers today wouldn't even think of dialing an 800 number to solve a problem. (I'm looking at you millennials.) The key is to be available to your customers, where they expect you to be. I think it can be easy to create and execute ideas in a bubble if we're not careful. The best way to know what our customers want, is by listening to them. Are you listening to yours?

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