You Have One Chance With Customers…Don’t Blow It

Just about every customer management professional in existence has encountered the declaration that even the most isolated customer service incident can carry lasting ramifications for the business. But for those clinging to the notion that the statement was soaked in hyperbole, it is time to let go. A new study reveals how irreparably damaging a single bad experience can be to customer loyalty.

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A survey of more than 2000 adult United Kingdom customers, conducted by Enterprise Rent-A-Car, reveals that 62% of customers who encounter just one instance of bad service will never buy from the relevant company again.

Talk about "do or die." One flub, one mistake, one "heart wasn’t in it" and the victimized customer, more often than not, is gone forever.

"The British public are no longer tolerant of poor service and quite rightly will vote with their feet," explains Mike Nigro, UK managing director, Enterprise. "Nowadays we have a 'one chance high street' - if you don't provide great service from the very beginning, you won't get a second opportunity."

With customers so inclined to pass early judgment, brands truly need to recognize the importance of delivering elite customer service at every touch point. In a multi-channel, social world, there are far fewer restrictions on how and when customers come face-to-face with an organization and thus far more opportunities for service to go awry.

Based on this research, even if a company produced an infinitely-great product, had a customer-friendly warranty and return policy and utilized a cutting-edge CRM system to strategically recognize and reward customers for their individual purchasing habits, one angry, dismissive service Tweet from one company rep could undermine all that customer-centricity. Instead of being the brand that literally tailored its operations to the needs of its customers, it, in the customer’s eyes, becomes the brand whose agents do not care enough about customers.

And six-out-of-ten times, that negative impression will be enough to prevent that customer from ever again purchasing the brand’s products.

In arming against this threat, a brand has no choice but to properly align its organizational structure and culture with the voice of the customer. No matter his touch point of focus and the nature of his role in the customer lifecycle, each service representative must believe that his performance is unshakably connected to a successful customer experience. Guided by the customer experience, he should see customer satisfaction as core performance metric; he should fully believe that customer unhappiness with his service will signal poor performance to his superiors.

For, as it turns out, the possession of friendly, responsive, competent employees is the key point of distinction between good and bad service. 84% of the respondents cited "helpful and responsive employees" as an example of what good service means to them, making it the most popular response.

On the flip side, 46% of customers deemed "rude and unfriendly staff" the most irritating thing about bad service, making it the most popular answer for that question.

As the ones actually communicating with customers at the relevant touch points, the front-line staff will naturally serve as the proxy by which customers classify the service as "helpful and responsive" or "rude and unfriendly." These employees, therefore, need to fully understand and appreciate their role in the process. They must recognize that they, often alone, hold the key to a successful or unsuccessful relationship with a customer.

But one cannot discount the degree to which that burden also falls on management. Certainly, some customer service red flags—drunk Tweeting, inappropriate language in front of customers, lack of smiling—should quite clearly be on the radar of all service representatives, who know very well they cannot engage in such practices. Good service, however, does not emerge simply because agents know which pitfalls to avoid.

Instead, it comes when employees truly buy into the notion that service levels dictate the success of the organization. If management creates mixed signals, muddling whether the agent’s responsibilities are to the corporate handbook or to the voice of the customer, it might get agents who competently follow rules, but it will never guarantee its agents are truly invested in the customer experience. In a world in which single impressions of customer service can mean everything, that guaranteed investment is a necessity.

Of certain importance is the idea of agent "empowerment"—customer support representatives must be capable of driving customer issues to real resolutions. Following the friendly vs. rude service issue, customers tagged resolute as the second-most important determinant of quality service. 75% associated "quickly sorting out the problem if something goes wrong" as a defining quality of good service, while 33% called "slow to fix problems" the customer service irritant they most hate.

With so much on the line, organizations need to be exclusively predicated on the voice of the customer. Management styles, customer policies and support guidelines should exist because they serve clear customer experience purposes, and agents should see customer satisfaction as a relevant token of their success or failure.

Those organizations who do not build themselves around a commitment to serve the customer will find themselves in prime position to blow their single chance to build customer loyalty.