Your customer experience is the main differentiator between you and your competitors, and all of the customer service statistics back it up. Show
Below, we’ve collected 111 key statistics exploring the relevance and importance of good customer service — and expanding on the cost and impacts of poor customer service. Rather than view these statistics in a vacuum, layer them over your own experiences and the services you are currently offering. There’s a little something in the following chapters for everyone — whether you’re new and just trying to chart the way for your team or have been doing it for years. The ROI of great customer service
Everyone wants to be known for providing excellent customer service. Not only does it feel good to be helpful, but it is a key differentiator, as the following customer service statistics show. Customer service, when done well, has just as much impact as a strong sales funnel or excellent marketing efforts. Not only that, but if your customer service team does a fantastic job, it may help boost your other teams’ effectiveness. It’s easier to make a sale when your customers feel supported, and word-of-mouth marketing after an extraordinary experience is one of the best pitches on the market. Not convinced? Here are a few customer service statistics that serve to emphasize just how paramount excellent customer service can be for your bottom line:
As you can tell, excellent customer service is a name maker, no matter what your industry. It helps grow revenue, maintain customer loyalty, and improve your overall business strategy. Key customer insights like customer satisfaction score and NPS help your customer service team improve and grow their impact. Beyond that, though, they also help your other customer-facing teams understand where they could be making improvements. Who wouldn’t want to give everyone else a leg up? The cost of bad customer serviceNow that we know how important good customer service can be for your business, it’s time to get a handle on the impact it can have when things go badly. Just like good customer service leads to your team’s success, poor customer service sets them back. A good experience means that customers are much more inclined to go easy if another experience goes awry. The following customer service statistics help to illustrate this:
Look at that last one! More than three-quarters of customers surveyed have backed out of a purchase because the customer service wasn’t as good as expected. If you showed that metric to your sales team, they would advocate for your customer service team to get as many resources as they need. Beyond that, customer service sets the stage for the rest of your company to succeed. Your customer service’s impact is more widely felt than that of any other team. When they fail, everyone does — and your customers know it. Caring about what customers thinkIt’s an ill-founded but common misconception that your customers don’t know as much as you do. While they certainly aren’t always right, they are very often at least thinking in the right direction. Similarly, they usually know when something has gone sideways or isn’t behaving the way it should be. Your customers’ thoughts and opinions matter. They can help you build a better product, help improve your internal processes, and give you a good heads-up that they’re thinking about churning. Here are some customer service statistics that will help you understand just what your average customer feels during or after an interaction:
There are a few metrics that stand out. The first is that most customers indicate that getting a response within 10 minutes of their request is essential or very important — that is a hugely impactful metric. In a world where first response and resolution times are critical, how close are you to that 10-minute mark? With this level of response rate, 71% of younger consumers believe that their experience is drastically improved — and it snowballs from there. When you’ve created an excellent customer service experience, you gain trust, protect yourself from customers going to your competitors, and prioritize making your customers’ journeys good ones. The second exciting statistic is that more than 70% of consumers believe that companies should collaborate on their behalf. So if a customer reaches out about an issue with an integration that they are using with your product, rather than advising them to reach out to the other product’s support team, you respond directly instead. This level of personalization and attention to detail can significantly impact your customers, as you’ll see in the next section. The power of a personal touch
Everyone wants to feel known. They want to believe that the people in their lives are thinking about them, considering them, and understanding their wants and needs. This extends to your customers, too. If you go a bit above and beyond to make your customers feel seen, heard, and cared about, it can have a massive impact on their experience and your company’s bottom line. If you can educate yourself on the user’s background and history before a call, integrate that into the customer service session. If you're not diving deep and reviewing things like sales history or personal information, at least take the time to ask the customer’s name. Read on to find some jaw-dropping customer service statistics around personalization:
As you can see, it’s not just about how you use a customer’s personal information, although that’s important. Many customers care about how you’re aggregating data and what you do with it after you have it. More than half of customers are comfortable sharing personal information in exchange for excellent service, but you still need to use that data carefully. After all, about 90% of customers are more likely to trust you if you’ve got a stellar privacy policy. Personalization helps to build deeper relationships, but only if it’s done correctly. If it isn’t done correctly, you can expect your customers to talk about it. The importance of word-of-mouthCustomers love to talk. They’ll share their good experiences, bad experiences, and everything in between. Similarly, customers like to listen. As you’ll see in the following customer service statistics, many users trust reviews from other customers or social media responses more than they trust the marketing of your actual company. Providing an excellent customer service experience, especially within the public eye of social media, is a massive boon to your company’s marketing efforts. While 50% of customers don’t share their experiences on social media, 72% will talk about them in person. That number gets even higher when considering how customers talk socially about poor experiences. Read on for some pretty impressive and shocking customer service statistics around when people do or don’t share:
That statistic about customers leaving without a word horrifies us every time! Consider how many negative responses you’ve had to CSAT or NPS surveys, then multiply it by 26 — scary, right? Luckily, some pretty great current technologies make it a bit more straightforward to provide an excellent customer support experience and mine for nuggets of valuable insights as you do it. Choosing the right support channelsBoth phone and email are the tried and true channels of customer service. Back in the 1960s, when call banks first came about, customers started getting comfortable with having a direct line to support. Then came email, providing either a single address or a group email to reach customer service teams. Now there’s live chat, co-browsing, virtual video calls, social media mentions, and tons of newly arriving methods for customers to reach out. Which one is best for your company? Take a look at the chart below to see different channels and how often each is used by support teams and customers: Each channel has pros and cons. Here are some customer service statistics to help illuminate the positives and negatives for each and to help with your decision-making. Omnichannel supportOmnichannel support is a continuous connection for customers between all of your channels. It effectively means that what someone does with a team on any channel can travel seamlessly to other channels with full context. For instance, your customer can start with a live chat and then transition seamlessly to a phone call as needed. Omnichannel support provides an excellent experience for customers because it means that they never have to re-explain something they already told another member of your team. When done correctly, it can seem like magic:
As you can tell, timeliness, the ability to use multiple channels, and consistency are the main benefits of omnichannel. Phone supportPhone support is one of the oldest forms of assistance. Since the invention of the rotary phone, companies and customers alike have depended on this valuable, reliable technology. Let’s take a look at some customer service statistics around teams using phones:
Although support teams heavily use traditional phone support, it seems that there are still some tools they could use more. For instance, the number of customers who prefer text messaging and mobile apps compared with the number of customer service teams that use them leaves something to be desired. Phone support is tried and true, but the opportunities available through mobile phones seems to still be a new frontier. Self-service supportDocumentation is beneficial for assisting customers without the need for your customer services team’s intervention. For example, a customer can search in your knowledge base and find answers within minutes which, in the long run, is a much better experience than having to wait for a response in an email or live chat queue. Unfortunately, though, when documentation isn’t done well, it can do more harm than good. Here are some customer service statistics exploring both the good and bad sides of your help docs:
As you can see, most customers would rather use a knowledge base/documentation to resolve their issues, but they aren’t always able to find them. Few companies have made efforts to create documentation, knowledge bases, or other options with which customers can serve themselves. Social media supportDespite social media’s role as a place to connect with friends and coworkers, many businesses and consumers are using it to connect as well. Functionality like Facebook and Instagram messaging have made it easy for users to connect directly with brands in a more meaningful and authentic way than they used to. Because of that, many companies are striving to create more presence in those environments. These two customer service statistics around social media make it easy to understand why:
Think about all of the people your brand could connect with if you were to make the switch to providing customer service via social media channels? Chat supportChat is primarily considered to be the fastest way for consumers to get support. It feels immediate, can often be fielded by automation, and doesn’t always require a lot of bandwidth to staff. Similarly, many younger consumers prefer it over more traditional technology like phones. If you haven’t already implemented chat within your team, here are two customer service statistics that may help you understand if it would be a good move:
There are many more customers who prefer to use live chat than companies who offer it! If you have the resources to implement it, chat may be an excellent opportunity to meet your customers where they are. Note that if your customers are searching for live chat and you don’t offer it, it may frustrate them even more. Dealing with angry customers
Anger is a widespread and extremely difficult emotion to control. For example, one-third of people who responded to a survey about anger noted that they or someone they knew had a severe problem controlling their anger. It may come as no surprise, then, that many of your customers, who are already in a stressful situation and need help, may become angry during an interaction. Anger can be scary, but when you understand where it’s coming from and why it’s happening, it can be easier to handle. For example, many customer service team members could benefit from reminding themselves that the customer is angry about the situation that led them to the interaction, rather than the interaction itself. For a few more reminders about anger within the context of customer service and how certain behaviors can lead to more profound customer anger, check out these customer service statistics:
Most customer frustration seems to stem from waiting or having to repeat themselves. What are some ways you might be able to speed up support interactions or provide additional context for team members to work against these two common issues? Putting some processes in place may help you work on these customer service statistics in the future. Preemptively addressing customer concerns and frustrations before they occur is a mark of a truly high-performing customer service organization. Building a world-class support team
No matter how much we talk about anger, frustration, or disappointment, the fact remains that customer service teams do the brunt of the work to ensure your customers are happy and successful. Unfortunately, customer service is often considered last when thinking about company policies, sharing information, or empowering teams. However, if these statistics have shown anything, it’s that customer service is essential and valuable to your customers. Here are some of the best practices that top-of-their-class customer service people put into practice and how it makes their customers feel:
It seems like the main differentiator for performance is appropriate training and company trust — and consumers notice the difference. When you take care of your employees and ensure that they have the tools they need, they can better care for your customers. Taking care of your support team
The tide is shifting in business. Many companies realize that their best employees could be poached and go elsewhere for more pay and perhaps a better employee experience. Therefore, it’s essential to prioritize your customer service team members’ needs and address their priorities. Below are a few customer service statistics that emphasize just how important the level of care that you provide is:
Consider those statistics, and imagine that you have six employees at the start of the year. By the end of the year, two or three of them will likely have left. That’s between $30k and $45k in expenses for losing employees who were likely doing an excellent job. As we know, good customer service representatives can make or break customer relationships, so prioritizing the people who do good work is extremely important. Consider what your customer service team needs more of, and try to find ways to offer it. Then speak directly to your team members about changes that you’ve made and the impact it has had on their quality of life. Ask them for their opinions, listen carefully, and then implement what you can. Making a better working environment for your agents will create an excellent environment for your customers. The impact of COVID-19While it feels painful to talk about COVID-19, our lives have changed with the pandemic and its associated effects. As we speak of healthy environments for employees, it feels remiss not to talk about the impact that COVID-19 has had on the customer service industry. The main trends are that customers are more challenging to please, more willing to switch to a company that aligns with their needs, and significantly less patient. We can’t blame them! However, given these shifts, your customer service team may need to change their strategies to directly address the concerns that customers in this new world have (all of the following statistics are from HBR):
Not only has COVID-19 impacted working environments and employees’ emotions, it’s affected customers in the same way. It’s much harder to connect with and solve problems for a customer who is burnt out and frazzled than it would be for a customer who feels secure and content. Unfortunately, COVID-19 puts everyone in a stressful position, making it infinitely harder to connect on a human level and meet customers’ needs through support. Hopefully all of those customer service statistics have given you a lot to consider and process. There are many different perspectives to consider and options to evaluate, but no matter what you’ve taken away from this post, we’re sure you’ll agree with this: Customer service is essential. Not only is it essential, but it’s valuable to your bottom line and serves as a critical differentiator of your company against others. If you treat every interaction as a way to get to know and love your customers, your team will be providing excellent customer service in no time. |