Customer-facing professionals need to know not only the scope of the challenges they face but also the results that stem from their actions. Statistics centered around the customer experience can help bridge the gap between performance and results.

The 9 statistics below are categorized into three important customer experience areas: customer loyalty, customer effort, and social customer service.

These facts can help you recharge and refocus your teams and can motivate them to provide the best possible service to your customers.

Customer Loyalty

• 82% of consumers in the United States said they stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer experience.

Your customers’ definition of a “poor customer experience” can range from simple things like not being acknowledged to challenging scenarios like delivering an expensive and time-sensitive product to the wrong address. Once a customer switches to a competitor, you won’t have the chance to make it right, and you risk losing their business for life.
Source

• It can be ten times more expensive to win a customer than to retain one, and the cost of bringing a new customer to same level of profitability as the lost one can be up to sixteen times more.

Imagine the amount of money your company will save — and make — simply by keeping the customers you already have. Higher profits create a healthier business; for frontline employees, this can lead to better pay, more functional teams, less turnover, and bigger budgets for providing even more great customer service.
Source (link no longer available)

• Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

Sales is sexy. The quest to land a new customer, the feeling of success that comes from welcoming that new customer into your organization’s experience. However, the statistic above should serve as a reminder that service is even sexier, and that existing customers are like gold in your pockets.
Source

Customer Effort

The concept of customer effort focuses on a few key drivers of customer disloyalty, many of which center around the work a customer must put forth in order to do business with you. The more efforts your customers invest to resolve an issue, the less likely they are to remain loyal to your business.

When researchers at the Corporate Executive Board studied 97,000 customers who had recent service interactions over the web and phone, they discovered the impact that customer effort has on loyalty. They also discovered the prevalence of customer effort:

• 56% of customers report having to re-explain their issue during the course of a service interaction.
• 59% of customers say they were transferred during a service interaction.
• 62% of customers report more than one contact to resolve their issue.

Source: The Effortless Experience, Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi. Advanced review copy. Page 29.

Customer effort is an important and new idea in the customer experience space. The above statistics provide a stark look at how much effort customers perceive and how important it is to focus on reducing effort.

For more on this topic, check out our interview with Matt Dixon, co-author of The Effortless Experience, here and here.

Social Customer Service

• Customers who engage with companies over social media are more loyal and they spend up to 40% more with those companies than other customers.

Whatever the reason, the people who engage with your organization over social media are invested in your brand. Companies often get lost in the “handling issues” side of social customer service and forget to focus on the brand evangelists and positive interactions.

I’ve been outspoken that not every company needs to invest in social media for customer service; however, if your company’s customers are on social, you need a plan to manage your social channels so that you can respond promptly, engage in positive interactions with customers, and build relationships online that will carry over into your physical location.
Source

• 40% of customers called a company’s toll-free number when they could not resolve their issue through social media.

Many organizations feel that they do not have time for social media; however, how much time does a phone call from a customer take — one who went to social media and was unable to be satisfied. Sure, many issues are too complicated to be solved on social but being present there gives you ability to start the issue resolution process and to be engaged with the customer.

If your organization is large enough, consider how many calls resulted from a failed first attempt on social media. Could you scale some of the phone time to manage your social media presence? As noted in the section above, the more effort customers have to make, the more disloyal they will be.
Source (link no longer available)

• The volume of questions asked by brands’ fans on Facebook during Q1 2013 has increased by 30% from Q4 2012.

The reality is, if you have a company Facebook page, your fans and your customers are going to ask you questions, questions about service received, products purchased, and issues they are having.

Notice the trend in the statistic above and make sure your are looking to the future of your social presence. As social media becomes a more common form of customer-company communication, you will need to pay as much attention to Facebook and your other channels as you do your voicemail box.
Source (link no longer available)

We hope these customer experience statistics will help you provide your teams a little bit of the why behind the need for great customer service and help you refocus and re-energize them to provide that next level of service.