Recently, potential customers have wider choices than ever in making a purchase. It is now more easier to compare services. With visible online reviews and customer engagement in a variety of channels, your business performance is under scrutiny. Clients and prospects have no problem switching over to a competitor if they consider them fit.
It is more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing one, so customer retention is crucial for business success and customer service has a drastic impact on customer retention. 89% of customers have stopped doing business with a firm after a bad experience and 58% will never deal with that firm again.
Loss of Business and Returning Customers
No matter how great your products are, if you don’t meet the service expectations of your clients, they’ll never be happy with what you’re offering them. Not listening to your customers and ignoring their needs will not just annoy them, but it will also make them leave your company. If your customer service is poor, you’ll have poor customer retention rates and you’ll never meet your business goals.
Bad Reviews Online
If you don’t take your customer’s complaints seriously and you don’t resolve those issues immediately and sincerely, you’ll lose customers and this will impact your company’s reputation. Most of the customers will reveal the truth about your poor customer service on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Negative comments and bad reviews spread quickly across social media and this will affect your reputation and your business’s goals.
New Customers Stay Away
New customers seek companies based on recommendations from people they know, and they’ll avoid a company when they hear first-hand accounts of poor customer service. People give more weight to negative reports than positive reports and they believe first-hand experience from their friends and family more than they believe impersonal sources such as advertising.
So if your customer service is poor, prospective clients may find your business but they’ll choose what your competitors offer.
Employees Leave
Employees know when things are not right in the company they work for. If they see frequent occurrences of poor customer service, they’ll start looking for opportunities with other companies. This is because dealing with dissatisfied customers makes their jobs hard and it makes the working environment toxic.
Management that doesn’t treat its customers well probably doesn’t care about the well-being of its employees either. High staff turnover tarnishes a company’s name. It creates more costs because of the increased need for recruiting, hiring and training of new employees.