Customer service is arguably the most important thing for your business to get right. Customers might not tell you that they’ve had a bad experience with your business — but they will tell their friends, family, co-workers and other acquaintances. If you aren’t taking care of your customers, and your business becomes known for poor customer service, expect customers starting looking at your competitors
No matter the size of your business, good customer service should be at the heart of your business model if you wish to be successful. It’s important to provide good customer service to all customers including new, existing, and potential customers.
Companies who are guilty of these bad customer service traits often face negative consequences — many of which are difficult to overcome and can lead to a business’s failure.
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Suffered Reputation
Your brand’s reputation is incredibly valuable and not something you want to lose control of. However, especially in the digital age, your reputation is the first thing to take a hit when you have an extended streak of bad customer service. A bad reputation for bad service spreads like wildfire and can seem at times irreparable. Angry customers often take to their keyboards and vent their frustrations online – be it in the form of a negative review, an irate tweet on Twitter, or something else. If anything, customers are more likely to leave a review after a negative experience than a positive one.
In addition to leaving critical reviews, customers also vent their frustrations on social media for their friends, family, colleagues, and the entire world to see. No matter how amazing your product is, if you are not meeting the service expectations of your customers, they will never be satisfied with what you are offering them. Furthermore, ignoring the needs of your customers and not listening to them will result in annoyed customers who will leave your business.
All this leads towards a decrease in overall sales, but more importantly, a major decrease in word of mouth marketing, one the most valuable marketing outlet any brand can have. Any word of mouth marketing would further impact your business negatively.
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Employees leave [restrict]
Employees know when something’s not right with the business they work for. Dealing with dissatisfied customers makes their jobs more difficult and eventually the working environment becomes toxic. When some of your employees aren’t pulling their weight, other employees will be forced to pick up their slack. This understandably can lead to resentment and anger from those employees who are left doing jobs and taking on responsibilities that aren’t meant to be theirs. Thus, they may become fed up and decide to leave their positions.
A management that doesn’t care about its customers probably doesn’t care about employee well-being either. Your customer service department will become inefficient and ineffective. No one wants to work for a company that is not top-notch. This results in a high employee turnover which further tarnishes the company’s reputation, and it creates more costs because of the increased need for recruiting, hiring and training of new employees.
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Loss of Customers/Profits
Word-of-mouth has two sides to it. Just as new customers seek out businesses based on recommendations from people they know, prospective customers will avoid a business when they’ve heard first-hand accounts of poor customer service. People tend to believe firsthand accounts from their friends and acquaintances more than they believe impersonal sources such as advertising, and they give more weight to negative reports than to positive reports. Prospective customers that might have found their way to your business will instead check out what your competitors offer.
When you lose customers, you lose sales. And lost sales equals a loss of profits. Depending on the severity of your customer loss, the number of profits you lose as a result could have a lasting impact on the financial health of your business. Poor customer service is bad for your bottom line. The shrinking customer base results in fewer sales, which leads to direct loss of revenue. Add to that the increased costs from employee turnover. A business that tries to salvage its reputation by boosting advertising and public relations efforts will have additional costs added to the mix. If no effort is made to improve service to get those lost customers back, the result will be a downward spiral that could eventually lead to you losing your business.
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