Poor Customer Service: What Your Business can do About It

These findings about poor customer service should provide a “wake up call” to all businesses and organizations.

Our friends at JitBit, a customer support software company, recently shared an infographic and article about poor customer service with us, and the data are striking. Before providing the link to the infographic, we wanted to summarize the article’s most critical findings that your business or organization should consider when creating, planning, and implementing customer service initiatives.

Although 80% of businesses believe that they provide “superior” customer service, only 8% of their customers believe that those same businesses actually deliver “superior” customer service.

Yikes! Yes, you read that right, so let that monstrous “realty gap” soak in.

Given this finding, the first task of your business should be to confront the following question, regardless of how sobering the answer: Why do we believe that our organization provides “superior” customer service, but our customers do not? Is it because of insufficient data? Is it because we rely too much on vanity metrics — in other words, data that, despite making us “feel good,” reveal very little about the actual quality of our customer service? (For example, is there a genuine relationship between average call time and “superior” customer service?) Simply put, are we measuring the wrong things?

60% of customers possess higher expectations for customer service now than they did a year ago.

Although you might be tempted to blame the “entitled” Millennials, you may be surprised to learn that the three groups of customers most likely to abandon your business because of poor customer service do not include Millennials. Rather, those high-risk customer groups include business-to-business customers, Generation X customers, and high-income customers.

This finding also reveals the difficult challenge involved in defining “superior” customer service: it’s like “limbo skating,” except that the bar is continually raised, not lowered. Loosely translated, merely because your customers believe your business offers “superior” customer service today, does not mean that your customers will necessarily articulate the same conclusion next year. Accordingly, in order to continually occupy the elite 8% of businesses that truly provides “superior” customer service, your organization needs to relentlessly pursue — without exception — continuous quality improvement customer service initiatives each and every year.

The most popular reason why customers abandon businesses is because they feel unappreciated.

As business leader Tim Sanders astutely observes in Today We are Rich: Harnessing the Power of True Confidence, we need to regularly exercise our “gratitude muscle.” It’s sage advice that will return dividends in customer loyalty to your business.

When was the last time you sent a customer a handwritten thank-you note? When was the last time you visited a customer, not to sell him or her anything, but rather just to visit? And when was the last time you had a box of bagels or doughnuts delivered to a customer? Avoid the temptation to categorize postage, bagels, doughnuts, and your time as “costs”; instead, they should be classified as “investments” — “investments” that will cultivate emotional connections with your customers.

This week, consider doing these three things:

• First, share JitBit’s infographic and article with your customer service team. In fact, why not discuss it during your next team meeting?

• Second, review the 11 Costly Traits of Customer Service, which appears below the infographic. Identify the “top three” traits that most likely negatively impact your particular business or organization, and formulate an action plan to neutralize those negative traits. Just don’t neglect to actually implement your action plan!

• Third, pose the following question to each of your team members, including your front-line staff employees: “How can our organization become even better at customer service during the next year?” You’ll find that your front-line, entry-level employees will likely provide you with valuable ideas to fuel continuous quality improvement customer service initiatives.

Will these three tasks require an investment of your time? Probably, but you’ll find that these activities will help insulate your business against poor customer service, and, as a result, differentiate your organization from competitors.

As always, have a “customerific” week!

Mark