What mistakes should companies avoid in customer service?

Customers constitute the raison d’être of every business and business, the springboard to their successes, but also to their failures. Satisfied, happy customers contribute to the good health of the business, remain loyal to the brand and even act as generators of new customers.

On the other hand, in a highly digitized world where social networks are part of our daily lives, an unsatisfied customer can share their complaints with thousands of contacts, friends and followers in a matter of minutes, leading to an unprecedented business crisis.

The vast majorities of today’s companies are aware of this, and know that they need (must) provide excellent customer service. Despite this, a recent report prepared by the company SuperOffice under the title “2017 Customer Service Benchmark Report”, shows the huge gap that exists between customers and companies regarding the perception of the quality of customer service: while 80% of companies believe that they provide excellent customer service, only 8% of customers share that perception.

Indeed, the data are surprising, so it became necessary to inquire about this difference of perception so abysmal in order to check whether the result was correct or not. For this, SuperOffice undertook research in three areas:

1. How companies compare their customer service.
2. How customer requests for assistance are answered and how companies handle them.
3. What to learn from the companies that offer the best quality in customer service.

In this paper they analyzed the quality of the customer service of 500 companies of all sizes and distributed all over the world. All of them were asked only two questions by e-mail:

1. Do you have a phone number that you can call?
2. Where can I find price information on your website?

The answer to these two questions was evaluated numerically from 0 (bad) to 100 (excellent), attending to fast response criteria, if both questions were answered at the first contact, response tone, follow up, etc. The results, as well as the premise from which this study started, were at least as surprising:

• 41% of companies did not respond to the customer service request.
• 90% of companies did not acknowledge receiving an email.
• 99% of the companies did not follow up on the customers.
• Only 11% of companies responded to both questions in the first response.
• The average response time was 15 hours.

The study continues to analyze these results one by one, while suggesting “best practices” in order to avoid these errors and evolve towards the best customer service.