10 Excellent Reasons To Pay Attention To Customer Service

1. Reliable service builds trust and confidence. Good support builds brand awareness and brand confidence. It makes your customers feel comfortable. When the customer has an expectation of a reliable, repeatable, pleasurable experience with a brand, loyalty increases. Customers have good role models for excellent service and their expectations continue to rise. Think of the brands you admire-the Zappos and Nordstrom models-and reflect on how comfortable you feel as a buyer.

2. Happy Agents = Happy Customers. Progressive companies emphasizing service and customer experience are more likely to have a career path for support representatives. This means lower employee "churn" and lowered staff costs. The new support person does not to be a reactive drone, but rather can shape the user experience and your product or service. This new agent is the human interface between you and your user, and a great resource.

3. A cost center no more. Service and support have moved out of the cost center column and turned into business drivers.

4. The survey says -- A good support experience is more important than price to 10% of buyers, which makes it a revenue enhancer.

5. Lowers barriers, reduces friction. Customer service insights, acted upon, make processes and messages more efficient, encouraging self-service and friction-free transactions. Friction-free service and support are now known to be the main drivers of the Customer Experience Score. The point isn't just whether an issue is resolved, but whether an individual's effort to get to resolution was acceptable.

6. Customer Wow is a competitive advantage. Superior service is a disruptive and sustainable competitive advantage-we've all seen that companies can rise to great heights on Customer Wow.

7. Great service helps with retention. It can make it easier and more graceful to cross-sell, up-sell, and migrate customers within the product/service line, making them "loyal for life." Obviously a lifelong purchaser has lasting value. Retained customers are much less expensive than acquiring new customers.

8. Support is cost effective. It's more expensive to acquire customers than to retain existing customers.

9. Customer service encourages strong advocacy and evangelism, both of which act as turbo boosters on social networks and other non-traditional channels. Advocacy and evangelism elevate the Voice of the Customer and encourage co-creation-thought to be the next big thing in product development. Advocates and evangelists act as unpaid members of the marketing team, and can be very helpful in speaking up to defend the brand.

10. The customer has never been more powerful than today, with the ability to offer opinions that can reach anyone on the planet. Support amplifies positive word of mouth. Over 50% of people will not do business with a company that has a poor service reputation. This decision, even in a poor economy, is based on service, not price.