Customer service is dedicated to helping existing and potential customers get plenty of value from their conversations with you. Giving them that value and going above and beyond their expectations is vital as it can help your business retain customers.

But there’s more to it. Let’s discuss.

What is Customer Delight?

Customer delight happens when you surprise your customers and clients by exceeding their expectations. When those expectations are met, you’ve achieved customer satisfaction. When those expectations are exceeded, you’ve achieved customer delight. That’s the key difference between the two.

You can achieve customer delight by being human, using relevant channels, being a figure and business they can trust, produce content that delights them and even build a personal connection they can’t get anywhere else.

With an empowered team, you can create the culture so that you can all go above and beyond when it comes to delighting your customers better than your competitors.

What Good Customer Service Can Bring to Your Agency

1) Boosts Customer Retention

Retaining your customers is a lot cheaper than acquiring new ones. Repeat customers are more likely to spend more with your business which can result in your business having to spend less on operating costs.

HubSpot reported that repeat customers spend 67 percent more with an increase in customer retention. Even a five percent increase in customer retention can equate to an increase in profit of at least 25 percent.

There are a lot of percentages here, but they’re all great figures when you satisfy and delight your customers.

2) Improves Your Business Image

How customers perceive your business can either make or break your reputation. Your customer service is that important connection to your customer. If you’re talking to your customers or you have a dedicated customer service team, they’re the direct line of communication who have the responsibility of representing the image of your business to them.

With great customer service and delighting them, relaying a positive message and experience can boost how your business is perceived by customers. This can convince them of your strengths compared to your rivals.

3) Increase in Referrals

By delighting your customers, they’re a lot likelier to spread the word to friends, families and even colleagues. Research has shown that 77 percent of customers have shared positive brand experiences with others.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When you have enjoyed an unparalleled customer experience from a brand that you didn’t expect, you’ll let people hear about it.  

That word-of-mouth advertising is severely underrated and if you give them a reason to refer you to others thanks to your excellent customer service, you can see an increase in business.

4) Boosts Loyalty

Working hand-in-hand with the points above, excellent customer service can see delighted customers remain loyal to your business. It’s simple - if they enjoyed a positive experience thanks to your customer service, they don’t really have a reason to go elsewhere.

The more they trust you, the more likely they are to stay loyal and that brings plenty of lifetime value from your customers.

So, if your customer service is engaging and helpful, then you and your business stand a better chance of, hopefully, developing lifelong relationships with your customers They’ll be able to differentiate you from your competitors - even if your products and services are virtually identical.

Plus, good customer service can be the all-important difference for them to stick by your side.

5) Willing to Pay More

There’s plenty of research to back up the claims that customers are willing to pay more to businesses that offer better customer experience.

It’s been found that 50 percent of customers increase their purchasing with a business after a positive customer experience while 86 percent of customers would pay up to 25 percent more to get a better customer experience.

So, it shows that customers are willing to literally pay more if they’re offered better customer service. This just proves how important it is that you focus on it.

One positive experience can lead to a customer sticking with you, whereas one bad customer service experience can just as easily see your customers run towards your competitors instead.

What Bad Customer Service Can Bring to Your Agency

1) Damaged Reputation

It’s actually easier to suffer from a damaged business reputation thanks to poor or a lack of customer service than it is to build up a reliable reputation over time. Nobody wants that on their conscious and if you end up making a habit of it, then it’s challenging to recover from even the tiniest of slip-ups.

With 25 percent of people recommending their friends to not use a business following a bad customer service experience and a massive 56 percent refusing to do business with them again, you’d be a long way from delighting them with your biggest battle bring trying to save your business reputation.

2) Negative Reviews Will Deter Other Customers

In an age where customer reviews tend to play key roles in purchasing decisions, it’ll come as no surprise if poor customer service sees your business painted in a negative light on social media platforms and review websites.

In fact, studies show that 20 percent of people will take revenge by posting a review online and 14 percent will share a poor customer service experience on social media.

It sort of links in with the previous point, as customer revealing the truth about your terrible customer service on channels like Twitter and Facebook will damage your reputation even more. If these negative comments spread rapidly and people start to take notice, then you’ll be a company notorious for poor customer service and that’ll deter other potential customers from buying or working with you.

3) Loss of Business

Your products might be amazing, the best on the market in fact, but that alone isn’t enough to satisfy customers now. If you’re not meeting or excelling customer expectations through strong customer service, then it can annoy them to the extent where they buy products elsewhere.

Not listening to them, ignoring them, speaking rudely or just not giving them a suitable solution in general means you’ll never have returning customers if your customer service isn’t good enough. As a whole, that’s terrible for the business as a lack of customers means a lack of turnover.

4) Employees Might Leave

There’s only so much your employees might be able to take from customers when they give them a piece of their mind about poor customer service. Dealing with dissatisfied customers can signal that the business isn’t doing something right and rather than working in a toxic environment where negativity is the norm and positivity is rare, they could seek opportunities elsewhere.

After all, if employees feel like senior figures don’t care about their customers as they continue to offer bad customer service, they can’t be blamed for thinking they don’t care about them either.

The points above should be enough to highlight the importance of good customer service and how easily it can be to leave a bad impression. Both customer service and delight are vital to the success of your business, but the tricky part can be knowing how to actually improve it in the first place.

In our next blog in the series we will look at easy ways to build up rapport with your customers over the phone. Ahead of that why not try CircleLoop By starting your free trial and installing the easy to use platform, you’re opening the door for more flexibility, collaboration and communication within your customers.