Recently, I came across the from 2011, which reports on consumer sentiment concerning the state of customer service in America. Interesting survey findings include the following:
- Consumers will tell 16 people about subpar service encounters. Conversely, they will inform only nine others about positive, memorable customer service experiences.
- Consumers value quality customer service and even will pay more to receive it as 70% indicated they would spend 13% more on average with businesses that deliver stellar service.
- Consumers will rebel with their wallets as 78% have canceled a transaction or taken their business elsewhere upon encountering negative, frustrating customer service.
Though this research study was targeted towards individuals, it is safe to say that the same attitudes and preferences on customer service hold true in the B2B world as well. Companies that differentiate themselves from the competition by providing superior customer service will earn repeat business from clients and begin to receive more referrals. On the other hand, customers that do not consistently deliver positive and meaningful customer experiences will suffer instant client churn and defections and drastically lose revenue.
Similar research from the Aberdeen Group entitled ” emphasizes how the customer experience can profoundly impact client acquisition, engagement, and retention. By continually measuring, monitoring, and improving the customer experience, firms can be more in tune with evolving service preferences and provide better service to their high-value clients and outperform their competition. As seen in the graph below that I created to display some of Aberdeen’s key results, Best-in-Class organizations that are committed to Customer Experience Management (CEM) initiatives constantly outperform their peers. For instance, customer retention rates, response times to customer inquiries, customer lifetime values (LTV), and customer satisfaction rates all improve considerably year after year for Best-in-Class companies compared to the Industry Average and Laggards.
Source: Aberdeen Group “Customer Experience Management: Using the Power of Analytics to Optimize Customer Delight,” Jan. 2012
Additionally, Aberdeen stresses how properly deployed CRM technology combined with a client-centric strategy can enable top-tier firms to achieve significant gains in their CEM programs. In fact, one of the recommended CEM strategies by Aberdeen is to replace highly fragmented views of customers with a single unified and consistent view of the organization’s customers via CRM. A robust, intuitive, and easily configurable CRM system, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, can certainly give firms this highly coveted all-encompassing 360-degree view of their customers and allow them to better hear and capture the voice of not just their customers, but also their stakeholders and shareholders.
To read more about how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 can serve as the foundation and enabler for your firm’s CEM and CRM strategic initiatives in route to helping improve your overall business results, please visit .
Post by: Kevin Wessels, Customer Effective
