15 Things That Make Customer Service Key To Business

There was a time when people thought customer service is all about being courteous in every interaction with a client. 

However, over the span of decades, customer service has evolved to become an integral element of any successful business and can have a great impact on your bottom line and how people view your brand.

You might have an amazing line-up of quality products or services, or you might have adopted the best help desk system to manage customer interactions. However, if you fail to deliver according to the customer expectations, you are far behind in the race of customer success.

This blog will highlight 15 compelling reasons why customer service matters and will matter for the decades to come.

Let’s get started to transform your customer service now!

As per the latest Global State of Customer Service report by Microsoft, 90% of customers have high regard for customer service quality, and 58% of them easily switch brands if they are unable to find quality support. Being available when your customers reach out, offering exceptional support via the channel they prefer, ensuring follow-ups, and engaging with your customers with proactive communication makes them feel valued and motivated to stay loyal to your brand.

Such loyal customers can also become brand advocates and the perfect word-of-mouth marketers when they share their experiences with their friends and family, online or offline. 

There are many benefits of customer service, such as improved customer retention, higher customer satisfaction levels, and better cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. 

Each of these benefits addresses your business's core development and steers it towards a more sustainable growth that stems from core values. Impeccable customer service leads to happy customers that have little or no reason to replace your brand. 

Further, when you interact with your customers, you know their preferences and brand expectations. This, in turn, allows you to offer personalized customer experiences that add more value to your business and make your customers feel valued.

Hence, better service translates to happy, satisfied, and loyal customers that are key to business growth and higher revenues. 

Brand reputation and brand awareness is something we all vie for yet, unable to control and monitor. However, customer service directly relates to the brand image, and most customers choose to do business with a brand with an amazing reputation for customer service. 

Great customer service means that you are always ready to offer a resolution, support your customers when they are stuck with issues in purchases and bad purchases alike. You should always be ready to evolve as their journey with your brand progresses.

As per BCG, customers worldwide embrace digital self-help modules but have not lost their liking for human support. Hence, the quality of your support directly determines your brand awareness and brand reputation. 

The importance of customer service in business is directly tied to customer value and overall business revenue because a major portion of this revenue comes from recurrent customers, where the value of retention is better than new customers. 

As per a survey, 89% of the companies find customer experience a critical factor in driving customer retention. Satisfaction is a cumulative result of your CS team's various efforts to curate personalized and delightful experiences throughout the customer journeys, instead of standalone touchpoints.  

Customer retention carves a sure-shot path to business success and keeps your customers happy and satisfied. It leads to earning a more stable revenue, gathering reliable data, and more accurate predictions. A majority of consumers cite good customer service as a reason to stay with a brand. 

Further, when you master retaining your customers apart from attracting customers, it makes the foundation of your business strong. Customer satisfaction reigns supreme when it comes to looking for business success beyond product satisfaction in the modern business landscape.

Better customer service generates better CLTV

CLTV or customer lifetime value is the amount of money a customer potentially brings with him over the time period of his interaction with a brand. Hence, CLTV is a direct driving factor for business revenue. 

But, why is customer service important for CLTV?

Better customer service drives customer engagement, and highly engaged customers are 90% more frequent buyers, generate three times more annual value, and spend 60% more per transaction as compared to the other customers. 

Customer service efforts for customer engagement comprise various efforts, such as proactive communication regarding personalized brand offerings' catalogs, social media following, and constructive interaction with the support team. Engaged customers accept, read and respond to your emails, blogs, and newsletters, etc. as well. 

Hence, you can work together as a business team that certainly leads to sustainable growth. 

There is no doubt about the importance of a customer feedback survey that offers you actionable insights into customer behavior, motivation, purchase patterns, brand expectations, and shopping preferences. A feedback survey is one of the most valuable data assets for your business organization that drives your business plan and fuels your strategy. 

When you offer impeccable support and ensure that every customer interacting with you gets a positive take away from the interaction, you generate positive and fulfilling relations. Happy and engaged customers are highly likely to respond to your surveys and participate in the brand-building process honestly and genuinely. 

They associate themselves with your brand and share their grievances, thoughts, and suggestions that offer the best and the most reliable data set for a thorough pulse check.

When you try to delight all your customers, you learn about them and their preferences holistically. This learning initiates a process of delivering value throughout the customer journey and focuses on innovative ways to satisfy your customers. 

Such thought processes and work attitudes inspire teams across the entire organization, and customer satisfaction becomes a company culture instead of a business goal. This revamps your organization’s culture, and every employee can associate with it, leading to a highly positive work environment that adds more value to your business and improved company culture. 

When everyone at your company is working towards achieving better customer satisfaction and creating delightful customer journeys, they have the same end-goals. This unified goal leads to better and more streamlined workflows that align your teams and departments to achieve higher customer satisfaction levels.

To leverage this to the maximum possible extent, we recommend setting long-term goals like NPS and CSAT that stem from customer experience based metrics. When all your employees have configurable KPIs set towards customer excellence, you can steer your organization towards growth and data-driven scalability.

Robust and reliable customer service drives positive experiences, which, in turn, increases your business's lifespan. Amazon is the best example owing to its ability to maintain more than 90% of its customer base for years now.

On the other hand, poor customer service is a silent yet swift business killer and is cited by Forbes as one of the top things that can destroy your organization. Customer service standards and expectations are at an all-time high, with more and more people looking for reliable support via different channels. 

With an expert and reliable frontline, you can transform your customer experience and business. This is why customer service is important.

When you deliver exceptional support and ask for small customer feedback or schedule a follow-up with a proactive reach-out for customer's responses towards your latest products or services, you can gather the most reliable and authentic data sets for analysis and further processing.

Advanced analytics powered by AI and ML etc, allow you to make more sense of these data sets and uncover hidden patterns and insights about customer behavior and motivation. This further allows you to offer more personalized experiences, more sorted and streamlined support, and create more rewarding customer journeys. 

Thus, improved service standards lead to a data-driven business approach, more measurable growth, and predictive analysis of customers.

When you aim to deliver happiness and satisfaction to all your customers, you try to:

All these efforts call for adopting smart and intuitive tools, such as customer support software that kick-start your digital transformation. This transformation proves to be the start of a business makeover that prepares you for the future market and Generation-Z customers. 

Embracing innovation and disruption with the right set of tools at your side allows you to be aligned with the customer demands at all times. 

The importance of good customer service goes beyond gathering insights or increasing your revenue. It also opens more channels for income and diversifies your product or service portfolio for specific customer segments with higher purchase power and can buy regularly.

As per studies, 50% of the customers increase their purchasing with a brand after a positive experience, and 67% will pay more for a better customer experience. 

When it comes to creating long-lasting impressions, you must remember that even a single positive interaction with your CS team can touch the hearts of hundreds and even millions in some cases. This is why the famous Trader Joe's story is still doing rounds on the internet after a decade!

With such precise revenue-related stats before you, it is extremely easy to understand how essential customer service is for improving your business.

COVID-19 pandemic caused the brick and mortar business establishments to close their shutters for an unspecified time and rendered millions of people jobless. 

With this novel situation, customers expect even higher customer service standards, such as measures for hygiene and disinfection, contact-less deliveries, more flexible and versatile payments, and extended communication regarding critical information, such as store timings and COVID-related measures, etc.

While many of these expectations might come as an added cost to your business, you are in for huge losses if you fail to deliver across the customer expectations. 

In such times, when the markets are unstable, and customers' interests are highly volatile, robust and efficient customer service is indispensable for your business to stay afloat.  

When you excel at delivering delight to your customers continuously, you create loyal brand advocates who are more than happy to share their reviews and experiences with your brand to their friends and families. 

Such customers give you an obvious and much-wanted competitive edge over your customers without having to do intensive brainstorming on discovering your competitors' strategies. When your customers share their stories and reviews online, you can economize on your marketing expenses. 

An excellent example is JetBlue Airways, which has many happy customers speaking about the brand every day and creating positive ripples in the community.  

Take a look at the most important aspects of customer service experience to customers worldwide (age-wise).

It clearly shows that to excel at customer service experience; you have to be more versatile in your service techniques and more flexible with your support process.  

Both of them transform your business gradually and you emerge as a customer-first brand that resonates with both - the employees and the customers. 

Such calculated and measured growth shapes the future of your organization in a promising and rewarding manner. 

When you vie for mere revenue, you think as a businessman and fail to discover the endless opportunities happy and satisfied customers can bring to you. On the other hand, when you become a customer-forward brand, you emerge as a business with unlimited means to increase your revenue and business value. 

Happy and delighted customers can empower your business in unimaginable ways and explore multiple avenues for success and growth.

So, start working on your customer journeys now, and kick-start a holistic business transformation today!

Good Luck!