The latest report by the Institute of Customer Service finds that satisfaction with big UK businesses is at its lowest for 15 years.
And maybe this should be no surprise when the standards we are routinely forced to endure are a national disgrace.
A lot of this has been driven by firms increasingly relying on online web-forms and chat bots which direct customers away from human-led customer service. This puts the onus on the customer to sort out their own problems and sends out the message that these firms don't really care all that much.
Yet at the same time more and more money is invested in those smiley chat-bot images and help-pages full of smiling 30 something women which gives us the impression they are here to help, when in reality they don't give a toss about our problems.
The cost of poor customer service...
There is a huge individual and social cost to poor customer service... if you add up all that collective time lost chatting to a bot that couldn't answer your question, not to mention time on hold, I dread to think how many person-hours that is over the course of a year and what the economic cost would be.
And there's a cost to business too..
According to this Guardian Article from 2023 poor customer service costs British business an astronomical £130 billion a year, with poor customer service initially resulting in staff on average having to waste 1 whole day a week dealing with dissatisfied customers.
Easy to sort...?
To my mind the evidence is pretty strongly pointing to the importance of good customer service.... it's worth investing in more staff being around to assist with problems and questions customers have because if you don't nip these things in the bud soon, then customers just become narked and the problems become more unpleasant and take longer to deal with.
Given the extreme costs of poor customer service I can't see it eating into profits at all if companies were to do better! They'd probably see more return business that way too!
Posted Using INLEO