A study by Verint on Customer retention found that the likelihood of a customer leaving a brand is around 31% – if they experienced one instance of bad customer support.

So the obvious question is – How do we know what good customer support looks like?

Well let’s imagine I bought a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and the barista also gave me a coupon code to register on Starbucks to get a 50% discount on a cappuccino.

The coffee lover I am, I do it immediately then and there with the Starbucks brownie in my hand.

And voila, great customer service.

How Does Great Customer Service Translate into More Business?

True story, the writer had the above experience, he then switched from a coffee house that charged him $2 for a cappuccino to Starbucks where he pays $5 per cappuccino.

The regular customer I am I end up giving them a lifetime value of at least a year.

Now let’s look at modest numbers.

Let’s say I make an average of 4 visits a week to Starbucks.

Four multiplied by $5 is 20, so that’s $20 per week.

Now what’s $20×4, it’s 80?

That’s 80 dollars a month.

What’s 80×12, wait let me get my calculator

Whoaaa……my smartphone calculator says $960.

Omg, $960 return on investment with a single instance of great customer service that costs Starbuck $1 to get.

 

 

Build Brand Not Short Term Sales

A study found that 73% of customers preferred to continue doing business with a conglomerate if they experience ongoing stellar customer support.

Author of the Four Hour work week Timothy Ferris created an automated sales model for his brain pill company Brainquicken (he exited the company in 2007).

Timothy found his life becoming an ongoing series of customer support queries that he insisted he handles himself.

He then decided enough was enough when he walked into his apartment and found a goodbye note his girlfriend left him.

The orange sticky note was pinned against a clock with Timothy and his girlfriend standing hands held.

The orange note spelt out the reason she left him.

The note read – “Working hours end at 5 pm Tim”

That was it,

Tim outsourced customer support and gave them a 100$ freedom budget.

What is this freedom budget?

Tim said in his book, the four-hour workweek, “I sent an email to the entire support team that read”.

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Hi All,

If any customer contacts you with a query, I want you to take a call on what to do.

As long as the solution does not cost more than $100 to offer (this means that his agents were given leeway’s on offering discounts, waivers and more) – take a call and close the ticket.

Tim went on to live a life of travel as he ran his business from the beaches of Costa Rica.

Once a week he would open his email to respond to any urgent queries.

It is essential that support teams have this ability to take calls on doing nice things for customers which burns your company logo into their subconscious mind, till the point they feel guilty not giving you business which makes them choose you over the competition.

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Equip Your Employees with Ninja Level Support Knowledge

40% of customers now prefer to resolve their queries through knowledge bases instead of speaking to a live agent.

Before I tell you about the extreme urgency nay, the absolute necessity for a company to have knowledge bases (think support articles) on their website – I want to tell you about the time my solopreneur friend Akash ran into a hitch hooking his Mail chimp account to his website.

Akash spent 10 caffeinated hours trying to make a simple action of an email autoresponder being triggered when someone hits submit now – happen…

Until he had a brainstorm.

Why not just contact mail chimp.

He had two options he could chat with them or email them.

Both would mean waiting another 45 minutes minimum trying to get a solution.

But Akash had to get this ad campaign on now.

He scrolled down to the bottom of Mailchimp’s dashboard, found the words support written and promptly hit click.

His aha moment was now a search bar away.

In the next five minutes, he found an article that showed him how to trigger an autoresponder and case closed.

Now I want to paint another scenario,

What if Akash found no Knowledgebase, did not want to invest time into speaking to an agent and found it more effective to pay the $15 membership fee to another email service provider.

Gone business, say bye-bye to customers if you do not have a knowledge base.

How do I build a knowledge base you ask?

I have no writers?

Well hire them, or you’ll be left with no customers.

Conclusion

Ensuring your business has some sort of strategy to keep customer retention rates high means you need to have all conversation around support taking place through one software.

You now have hard evidence on what your agent activity looks like, what calls they made and what escalation was raised.

This is possible with Kapture’s Helpdesk CRM.

A fully functional service suite – your ninja level customer service perfection n strategy is just a free demo away.

Click the banner below to get a free 30 day trial of Kapture’s Helpdesk CRM.