“Trick or Treat?” is a fine question to ask at doors on Halloween night, but when your customers come a knockin’ for service, there should be no response that isn’t a “treat.” In other words, with consumer experiences serving as a major differentiator in today’s marketplace, if you hope to remain competitive, your customers should always be “treated” to excellent service when they reach out to your contact center.

So, how do you make certain you aren’t frightening consumers away with scary, or just plain bad, customer service? The best way to ensure you are offering quality customer interactions is to employ well-trained, highly professional contact center agents. And the most efficient, cost-effective way to coach and train agents is to adopt Click2Coach—contact center software from Envision.

Customer service is, and always has been, at the core of the contact center. For instance, aggregated research shows that 71 percent of customers have ended their relationship with a company due to poor service. Furthermore, 39 percent of customers admitted to avoiding a company for two or more years after a negative service experience. As a result, 62 percent of organizations view customer experience provided through the contact center as a key competitive differentiator.

Almost any blog you read on the topic of customer service will tell you the same thing: customer care (i.e. retention, loyalty, quality of service, diminished churn) must be a top priority for organizations. A sea of related statistics and market research corroborates this sentiment. For example, according to aggregated research from HR consulting firm Adecco, 15 percent of customers will abandon a company due to poor customer service; meanwhile, loyalty from one customer can be worth 10 times as much as one-time purchase.

The Internet is full of statistics about so many topics that it can be difficult to drill down to truly critical nuggets of information. In particular, the Web is replete with facts about the importance of improving customer service. So, to help you avoid wearing out your keyboard with search engine queries, we decided to compile 10 of the most compelling business-related customer service statistics you’ll find anywhere:  

By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. – Walker, “Customers 2020: The Future of B-to-B Customer Experience”

Every company today knows full well that customer service is at the core of its profitability and continuity—especially for a few select industries. In fact, a new survey commissioned by global market research firm Ipsos calls out those verticals that boast the worst customer service departments: 

All too often, contact centers are referred to as cost centers. While they certainly play an important role in ensuring customer satisfaction (i.e., answering customer inquiries, solving product and service-related problems and monitoring call quality), contact centers are viewed as having little to no real impact on bottom line results. Businesses, however, are starting to realize the value of the contact center as a potential revenue driver. 

“I’m just looking,” is a well-known clue to retail salespeople that they should back off: the customer just wants to browse. But how do your service agents know when to back off during a service call?

Establishing boundaries is key to effective customer interactions, especially where your agents want to upsell and/or cross-sell. But in their quest to make extra sales, sometimes these agents can be overzealous. Remember the extreme example from Comcast just a while back in which the customer service rep refused to let customer Ryan Block cancel his service? The agent’s refusal to comply with the user’s wish was a national embarrassment, on top of almost certainly costing Comcast any chance of ever winning that customer’s business back.  

In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for a customer to dial into an 800 number, wait on hold for over an hour and then be routed to an inexperienced, unpleasant customer service representative who couldn’t answer a simple inquiry.

By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator with approximately 80% of executives expecting contact centers to play a key role in defining it.

But, while the majority of companies say they deliver "superior" customer service, only 8% of customers agree. So, where is the disconnect, and how can contact centers bridge the gap?

Join us for this webinar where we'll uncover the key challenges preventing contact centers from meeting customer satisfaction expectations and 6 ways to address them including:

Social media platforms have become the new 1-800 number. With nearly one in four people worldwide projected to use social media in 2013, it comes as no surprise that customers are turning to these networking platforms to connect with brands and vice versa.