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What is Customer Service?

Phrases such as “we put the customer first” or “the customer is always right” adorn the walls and desks of organizations everywhere. However, there is more to customer service than hanging a poster or talking about it. The most successful businesses have learned that customer service is their business. Making the decision to take your team through customer service training puts you in good company. Customer service training will help your employees realize that service quality is created one customer and one encounter at a time, each and every time to the specification of that one customer. The real service mission of your company should not be to get the customer in the door but to make sure their experience brings them back. Giving your employees the knowledge, skill and ability to consistently deliver exemplary customer service is your organization’s key to long term survival and success.

Why invest in Customer Service?

The inability or failure to deliver quality customer service costs organizations millions of dollars every day. The single most important aspect of a successful business is good customer service. Customer service research confirms that:

• If a company increased their customer retention by two percent, it is the equivalent of cutting their operating expenses by ten percent.

• It costs five to seven times more to find new customers than to retain current customers. “Totally satisfied” customers are six times more likely to repurchase a company’s products over a span of one to two years than merely satisfied customers are.

• A typical business only hears from 4% of its dissatisfied customers. The other 96% quietly go away. Of this 96%, 68% never reveal their dissatisfaction because they perceive an attitude of indifference in the owner, manager or employee.

• Often employees perceive dissatisfaction in a customer but choose to ignore it and hope the problem will go away. However, if the customer goes away with the problem, the customer will likely never return to the business.

• If a dissatisfied customer can’t express their complaints to the business they will express them through other outlets such as friends, neighbors and family. A typical dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten people about their problem. One in five will tell 20.

• It takes 12 positive service incidents to make up for one negative incident. Seven out of ten complaining customers will do business again if you resolve the complaint in their favor. If you resolve it on the spot, 95 percent will do business with you again.

For more information, please contact Karin Fowler, Business Practice Leader for Customer Service at 314.539.5357 or kfowler@stlcc.edu