What are the costs of losing your customer service focus?

When you start prioritizing other areas of your business and leave little time for your customer service, the inevitable outcome is poor customer service delivery. It goes without saying that poor customer service solutions, such as ineffective call center support services, can turn every customer experience into an unpleasant one. But what most people fail to understand is that, the loss of customer service focus can lead to so much more repercussions other than just low customer satisfaction.

The worst assumption a business can make is thinking that excellent customer service entails a lot of unnecessary expenses. This mindset discourages openness to the idea of investing in modern customer service strategies, such as customer service outsourcing, and allocate the resources to other more important tasks instead. When it comes to customer service, it’s an all-out war. Any form of reservation can lead to lost opportunities.

Although it’s true that upgrading customer service can be costly, losing your customers because of the loss of customer service focus can be far more detrimental to your business. The negative impact every business may experience once they start to lose focus on their customer service strategy may vary in extent. Some of the possible repercussions are:

• Rectification costs

Every mistake you make costs money to correct what has been done improperly. Whether it’s replacing an item that was wrongly described to a customer or repairing low quality call center equipment, the money and effort you exert in compensating for the customer service errors you committed can be an added burden to your business.

• Opportunity loss

In an industry where multitudes of companies are selling similar products, one of the few things that can keep you ahead of the competition is quality customer service. Customers are more willing to shell out bigger money in exchange for exceptional customer experience. If you take this differentiator for granted, you are making your brand less attractive than your competitors.

• Staff turnover

One factor that makes an employee stay in a company is the reputation of the organization. Employees take pride in the companies mentioned in their resumes. If your business starts gaining poor reputation mainly because of awful customer service, your agents will most likely find a way to stop being associated with you by looking for another employer.

The kind of experience your customers gain from doing business with you depends on the amount of focus you give to your customer service. If customer service is prioritized in your business, it will ultimately become customer-centric and highly profitable. You must therefore make sure that everyone in your organization, from management to customer support agents, upholds the same value for customer service in order to gain stronger customer relationships.