Yes, you heard it here first: A Poor Customer Service Experience will likely lead to customers shopping elsewhere and, therefore, reduced customer loyalty and lower revenues. Okay, I wasn’t the first to say that, but this fact is obvious to most of us. Yet, study after study, is published revalidating what we’ve known for years.
Such is the case with a recent report from Internet Retailer [1. http://www.internetretailer.com/2010/09/22/call-center-frustrations-may-cause-consumers-shop-elsewhere]. Here’s what they report:
The report, Could you repeat that please?’: The costs and impact on the customer experience of poor voice quality, is based on a survey of 3,925 consumers in the United States, U.K., Germany and France.
The survey found that 42% of all contact center calls are affected by voice-related issues. That can be problematic, says the report, because 68% of consumers say they hang up if they have trouble understanding an agent, and if they’re calling about a new product or service they are likely to call a competing company instead.
Customer Service that suffer from poor voice quality or from customer service agents that do not speak the native language of the customer, the study shows, will likely lead to the customer hanging up and calling a competitor. I’m sure about you, but poor voice quality seems like a quick, relatively easy fix to me that could yield big positive results. Besides that though, there are other issues found in call centers that need to be dealt with.
This finding has implications for outsourcing services – most call centers are outsourced to lower cost areas such as the Philippines, India, or elsewhere.
Lower Cost, Lower Revenue
So, in the outsourcing bandwagon that many companies are jumping on, it is important to remember that chasing lower cost with the language-conflict tradeoff, will probably mean customers fleeing your service.
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