The present state of rising inflation is making clients world wide extra frugal, and it’s impacting each B2B and B2C markets—and inflicting many firms to view deliberate investments with extra warning and even delay them. When new enterprise turns into tough in such instances, new analysis from enterprise service administration agency OTRS Group affirms that good customer support cannot solely guarantee steady and good buyer relationships, but additionally supply extra cross-selling and upselling enterprise.
The agency’s newly launched OTRS Highlight surveyed 500 worldwide customer support leaders in Germany, the US, Brazil, Mexico and Singapore on varied features of customer support. The primary installment of the three-part collection reveals how essential customer support is for buyer loyalty and satisfaction, and the way essential it’s to work along with different departments within the firm.
Customer support is crucial for buyer retention and satisfaction
This was confirmed within the survey, the place contributors have been requested to price the significance of customer support because it pertains to buyer retention on a scale of 1 (no position) to five (essential position). An amazing majority of 95 p.c of respondents gave customer support 5 (65 p.c) or 4 factors (30.2 p.c), thus assigning it the best significance. On the significance of customer support as pertains to buyer engagement, the survey values are solely barely decrease at slightly below 90 p.c: It receives 5 factors from 50.8 p.c of respondents and 4 factors from 39 p.c of contributors.
Freedom to behave makes buyer help sturdy
To have the ability to help clients successfully, you want a customer support crew that may not solely supply options, however ideally implement these instantly. Three-quarters of the businesses subsequently give their customer support groups the chance to take motion with reductions, deadline extensions, account credit score notes, and many others.: 40.4 p.c of respondents, for instance, could make nearly any change with out extra inner approvals, and 35.2 p.c of them could make particularly outlined modifications to the client account. Customer support is thus strengthened by autonomy and freedom of choice.
Cross-departmental cooperation results in higher buyer satisfaction
Even when customer support is of nice significance to the standard of the client relationship, it additionally wants—particularly for profitable cross- and up-selling enterprise—good cooperation with different departments within the firm: 92 p.c of the respondents count on the service crew to attract the client’s consideration to extra services or products throughout their contact. Thus, among the many survey contributors, customer support is perceived to have a excessive stage of shared duty and with different firm departments, significantly for buyer satisfaction at 42.2 p.c and buyer loyalty at 28.8 p.c; this determine is considerably decrease for buyer churn at 13.2 p.c.
Success elements: administration help and automatic processes
However what helps firms enhance collaboration and communication between customer support and different departments? Clear administration help for cross-functional work on the client expertise (20.4 p.c), automation of inner processes (24.2 p.c) and, above all, the creation of a direct communication channel from customer support to the corporate’s product and repair specialists (27.6 p.c) are cited for this function.
“The primary OTRS Highlight on Buyer Service reveals, on the one hand, the central position of customer support for buyer satisfaction and for cross- and upselling alternatives,” mentioned Andreas Bender, VP Consulting at OTRS AG, summarizing the outcomes of the worldwide survey in a information launch. “Nevertheless it additionally reveals how good collaboration with different departments strengthens customer support groups. Automating such cross-functional processes with options like OTRS offers helps on a technical stage to all concerned groups as they collaborate for good buyer retention in addition to cross- and up-selling tasks. Clear help from management and administration stays important for this.”
