If you look at the world’s most highly successful organizations, you will find something in common: great customer service. And yet, not many organizations take this extremely useful business function seriously. Customers are the lifeblood of any organization that provides goods and services to the public. This is why customer service comes with a number of undeniable benefits.
Here are seven reasons why customer service should be taken seriously by your organization.
1. Increases Sales
Good customer service is likely to lead to increased sales. This is because if customers feel they are being valued by the organization, they are more likely to part with their money. This will lead to more business for you, which translates to greater sales and higher profits. Not only that, but they will also be more inclined to try out some of your other products and services while they’re at it.
2. Increases customer satisfaction
With customer service, you can increase customer satisfaction. Above anything else, your customers want to be treated right. This means that satisfaction is way more valuable to them than price. So even if your offerings are pricier than your competitors, as long as your customers are satisfied, they will keep on buying from you.
3. Makes customers more loyal
Good customer service is more likely to increase your customer retention rates, meaning that customers will always pick you over your competitors. This is because customer service has the power to build and sustain strong relationships with consumers that they become extremely loyal. Plus, retaining customers should be a priority anyways since it is six times cheaper than acquiring new customers. This makes your business more sustainable and also saves you money in the long-run.
4. Turns customers into advocates
Those customers that you retain through great customer service will become your biggest advocates because they are satisfied and have become loyal. And with the prevalence of online review websites, such as Yelp and Google Business, unsatisfied customers are bound to become vocal about a negative experience. And people tend to listen to other people, which can end up making you lose a lot of customers.
But through customer service, you can create a positive customer experience that can lead to advocates. These people will also be vocal as well, posting positive customer reviews on review websites. They will even recommend your products to family and friends. This will lead to more exposure for your products and services, which will translate to increased revenue.
And something else happens when you have customers that are advocates. When someone tries to spread negative word of mouth about you, they will go out of their way to defend you. All this because you managed to meet and even exceed their expectations with every interaction.
5. Enhances public image
Customer service can’t always be perfect. Once in a while, customer service is bound to mess up, causing an incident that can ruin the public image of the organization. But if customer service has worked hard enough to build some goodwill with the customers, the public image of the organization is protected.
6. Increases employee morale and motivation
When customers are satisfied through customer service, employees can start to feel good about themselves and what they do. This can make the workplace a positive environment for everyone; employees and customers. This means that the workers will become more motivated to keep the positive energy in the workplace going, working hard to that end.
7. Makes the organization more competitive
With great customer service, the organization becomes more competitive. Since your customer service representatives have managed to build and sustain strong relationships with your customers, it will be extremely difficult for your competitors to break that bond. This will make your organization extremely difficult for the competition to beat.
Conclusion
As you can see, customer service provides a lot of benefits to the organization that simply cannot be ignored. From increasing sales to making customers loyal advocates to providing a competitive advantage, customer service is an essential business function. And this is why it needs to be taken seriously.
