The Impact of Poor Customer Experience on Your Bottom Line

Customers are every business’ lifeblood, and the way businesses interact and engage with their customers goes a long way towards securing future business, loyalty, and recommendations.  The challenge, of course, is today’s customers are much more fickle than ever.  It’s a factor of increasingly competitive markets combined with technological advances that have put a premium on customer experience.  If you can’t deliver a quality end-to-end customer experience, you’re fighting a losing battle.

A Microsoft study clearly showed that customer experience is increasing in value, with 54% of customers indicating higher expectations for customer service than they had one year earlier.  That’s a figure that jumps to 66% for the Millennial generation, which has now become the largest single age group in the US workforce.

Many studies over the past few years clearly show that companies that fail to focus on and recognize the value of customer service and customer experience – and take steps to deliver on customer expectations – put themselves at risk. 

For instance:

• 73% of buyers point to customer experience as an important factor in purchasing decisions;
• 65% of buyers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising;
• More than half of Americans have scrapped a planned purchase or transaction because of bad service.
• 70% of customers report that technology makes it simple to take their business to a competitor if need be, and they are more likely than ever to do so when their expectations aren’t met.

But, there is good news as well.  Customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience, and 69% of consumers say they have already made a choice to support a company that delivers great customer service.

All this is pushing businesses to invest in new technologies to complement their customer strategies.  The fact is that, just as technology makes it easy for customers to move to competitors, it also makes it easier for companies to excel at customer service.  Particularly with cloud-based services that provide businesses with maximum flexibility to adapt to and meet customer expectations, there’s no excuse for poor customer service.

I recently moderated a webinar that spoke to this subject and explained why customer experience matters – and what happens if businesses fail to deliver on customer expectations.  Ultimately, it’s all about the bottom line.  During the session, The Keys to Customer Retention and a Winning Customer Experience, Mark Batchelder, regional channel manager for Unified Office, spent time digging into the numbers to show how revenue is impacted when customer experience falters, and how businesses should leverage cloud technology to become masters of customer experience.

If you didn’t get a chance to join us for the live webinar, take some time now to hear what Mark had to say about the impact of poor customer experiences.