Many small to medium-sized businesses often miss prioritizing customer service because they don’t fully realize its impact. Excellent customer service goes beyond building goodwill; it directly affects your financial outcomes.
In this blog, we'll explore outstanding customer service's practical and straightforward financial benefits. We'll also share helpful tips on how your business can improve customer service.
What Is Customer Service?
Customer service refers to the guidance a company provides its customers before, during, and after a purchase. It involves giving them support and assistance, whether they have questions before buying something, need help during the purchase, or have issues afterward.
Good customer service is about making customers feel heard, solving problems with a friendly attitude, and ensuring they're happy with what they bought.
Why Do You Need Excellent Customer Service?
Customer service plays a pivotal role as the primary link between your business and its customers. When you deliver outstanding customer service, you can effectively retain and extract value from customers.
It not only fosters loyalty but also prompts satisfied customers to refer new clients, participate in case studies, and offer testimonials and reviews, contributing to the overall success and reputation of the business.
Far from being another buzzword, there's concrete evidence that exceptional customer service is a financial game-changer.
McKinsey's research reveals a staggering impact: businesses enhancing customer experience witness a 2-7% surge in sales revenues and a 1-2% uptick in profitability. If that isn't compelling enough, shareholder returns skyrocket by 7-10%.
3 Financial Benefits of Excellent Customer Service
The impact of excellent customer service extends far beyond customer satisfaction—it directly translates into tangible financial benefits. Let's unravel the three key advantages businesses unlock through top-notch customer service.
1. Customer Retention
You should aim to hold onto your existing customer base rather than solely focus on pursuing new clients. Customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition, as it costs six to seven times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.
Moreover, loyal customers spend more and buy more frequently than new customers. On the other hand, a poor customer service experience can drive customers away and damage your reputation.
To further understand how customer retention can affect your company, take a look at these mind-boggling statistics:
- Due to lousy customer service, U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually.
- 91% of uncomplaining customers who experience dissatisfaction choose to leave.
- Acquiring new customers costs companies 6-7 times more than retaining existing ones.
- 65% of companies effectively upsell or cross-sell to their current customers.
- In contrast, only 12% of companies successfully upsell or cross-sell to new customers.
2. Customer Advocacy
An additional advantage of exceptional customer service is converting satisfied customers into advocates for your brand.
Customer advocacy is when customers recommend your products or services to friends, family, and social networks. It can generate word-of-mouth marketing, one of the most influential and cost-efficient ways to acquire new customers.
According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, and 74% identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in purchasing decisions.
Recognizing the far-reaching impact of individual interactions and emphasizing the significance of customer support is crucial.
These statistics underscore the importance of excellent customer support in promoting customer advocacy:
- Customer dissatisfaction results in 13% of individuals sharing their discontent with 15 or more people.
- Conversely, 72% of consumers spread the word about a positive experience to 6 or more people.
3. Customer Enrichment
Another valuable outcome of outstanding customer service is the potential to enrich your customers. Customer enrichment means you can increase their spending and usage of your products or services.
Customer enrichment contributes to the growth of customer lifetime value (CLV), which is the long-term financial forecast for each customer. Enhancing this value encourages customers to shop with you more often or spend more money.
By delivering top-notch products or services and exceptional support, you increase the chances of immediate purchases and set the stage for customers to keep coming back.
Each positive experience acts like a building block, making customers more likely to return and stay connected, ultimately boosting your CLV.
How Your Business Can Improve Customer Service
Now that you understand why customer support is crucial let's explore practical tips to enhance your service. These proven methods can help you surpass customer expectations, foster long-lasting relationships, and drive positive financial outcomes for your business.
1. Keep Your Customer Service Employees Happy
Customer service employees are the frontline representatives directly interacting with customers, so their satisfaction is paramount for business success.
So, how do you keep employees happy? Recognizing and prioritizing their needs and providing necessary resources and technology can go a long way.
It not only fosters a positive work environment but also translates to enhanced customer satisfaction. When customer service teams are well-equipped and content, the ripple effect positively influences employee and customer experiences.
2. Improve Customer Satisfaction with HubSpot Surveys
Businesses have typically turned to surveys to understand and improve customer satisfaction. Yet, traditional survey methods encounter inherent challenges, making it difficult to grasp the essence of the customer experience.
Among the challenges of traditional survey methods are:
- Incomplete data coverage
- Feedback delays
- Failure to unearth root causes rather than surface symptoms
Instead of relying on traditional surveys, you can try utilizing HubSpot surveys. They provide a modern and efficient alternative, addressing the limitations of traditional survey methods.
Creating and conducting customer satisfaction surveys with HubSpot
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores are invaluable metrics that gauge the satisfaction levels of your customers regarding your product, service, or overall brand experience. Utilizing customer satisfaction surveys through HubSpot allows you to gather valuable feedback on their interactions with your business. In this guide, we'll walk you through the process in an engaging listicle format.
1. Navigate to Feedback Surveys in Your HubSpot Account:
- Access your HubSpot account and go to the 'Service' tab.
- Click on 'Feedback Surveys' to initiate the process.
2. Create, Clone, or Edit a Survey:
- For a new survey, hit 'Create survey' in the upper right corner.
- Choose 'Customer satisfaction' on the next page and click 'Next.'
- To clone an existing survey, hover over it, click 'More,' and select 'Clone.'
- For editing an existing survey, hover over it and click 'Edit.'
3. Select the Delivery Method for Your Survey:
- Choose how you want to deliver your survey – via email, chat, or on a webpage with the HubSpot tracking code.
Note: The delivery method cannot be changed after the survey is published. Contacts don't need to be marked as marketing contacts to receive an email survey.
4. Set Permissions for Email Surveys:
- To send an email survey, ensure users have Marketing access permissions, including Publish access to the Email tool.
5. Click 'Create' and Customize:
- After setting up the basics, click 'Create.'
- Use the edit pencil icon at the top to give your survey a unique and descriptive name.
By following these steps, you'll be well on your way to gathering insightful customer feedback and enhancing your overall customer satisfaction strategy with HubSpot through different delivery methods that work best for you and your customers.
Complete Data Coverage
HubSpot surveys offer a variety of survey types, including Custom Surveys, Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
These options allow you to tailor surveys to your specific goals, ensuring that you collect comprehensive and relevant data. By reaching out to customers at different touchpoints, HubSpot surveys let you explore a more holistic view of their experiences.
Real-time Feedback
Say goodbye to feedback delays. HubSpot's Service Hub allows you to create and deploy surveys directly within your platform, enabling you to gather real-time feedback.
Its immediacy ensures you capture insights when they matter most—right after a customer interaction. Prompt feedback empowers your team to address issues quickly and capitalize on positive experiences.
Plus, through automation functionalities, you can set up follow-up tasks or email alerts to swiftly handle negative feedback. Interacting promptly with unhappy customers can positively transform their experience and cultivate customer loyalty.
Root Cause Analysis
Traditional surveys often fall short in uncovering the root causes of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. HubSpot surveys, with their customization options and automation features, enable you to ask targeted questions and delve deeper into customer responses.
What’s more, HubSpot allows you to generate reports from survey responses, providing crucial insights into customer trends. When you consistently monitor reports, you can pinpoint improvement areas and tackle root causes of issues.
3. Embracing Customer Self-Service
In today's world of high customer expectations, embracing customer self-service can be the key to enjoyable interactions. This approach recognizes the changing preferences of customers who want quick solutions, personalized service, and the freedom to solve problems on their own.
Customer self-service means giving customers the tools and information they need to fix issues without talking directly to company representatives. It can include automated chatbots, help centers, and community forums for fast and easy solutions.
Customer self-service leads to several benefits for businesses:
- Reduced Support Expenses: Decreased need for a large customer support team, leading to significant cost savings.
- 24/7 Accessibility: Faster solutions at any time, even outside regular business hours.
- Better Customer Experience: Swift issue resolution enhances satisfaction and contributes to an overall positive experience.
- Higher Customer Satisfaction: Access to tools and resources empowers customers to use products or services successfully.
Conclusion
Prioritizing excellent customer service is a strategic financial investment. Businesses can significantly impact their bottom line by fostering customer retention, advocacy, and enrichment.
Leveraging tools like HubSpot surveys and embracing customer self-service are modern approaches that address traditional challenges.
For those seeking to maximize these tools, partnering with HubSpot experts, such as Origin 63, can amplify these strategies for exceptional results.
We trust this article has equipped you with actionable strategies to enhance customer service and drive positive financial outcomes. If you have additional questions, feel free to reach out to us. Your journey to improve customer service and business success begins here.
