Examining the Customer Experience Impact on Loyalty

When it comes to building brand loyalty, nothing matters as much as providing an engaging and effective customer experience.

We’re all familiar with how a customer’s experience can affect brand loyalty, but just how much influence does it have?

A survey conducted by Ovum of contact centre managers and customers found that 76 percent of customers will drop a business after a single bad experience. Consider that for a second — less than 25 percent of the population is willing to give your business a second chance if you blow it on the first run. This highlights one of the most critical lessons of building a loyal following of consumers:

The customer experience has a direct impact on customer loyalty.

Circle it, underline it, highlight it, then circle it again. Here’s a closer look into why.

The Deciding Factor

Customers today have more options than ever thanks to increasing industry competition and the interconnectivity of the Internet.

Buyers can go online to find the best prices, and when faced with multiple businesses offering the same product, what’s the deciding factor for the informed consumer?

More often than not, it’s customer service.

3 Ways to Ensure a Good Customer Experience

We’ve established that creating a valuable and engaging customer experience is essential to building loyalty. So what makes an effective customer experience?

To answer that, it may be easier to examine what makes a bad customer experience. According to research conducted by Accenture, the top three biggest customer frustrations were agents taking too long to resolve a problem, being kept on hold for too long, and dealing with agents unable to provide solutions.

With that in mind, we can safely say that to build loyalty, contact centres need to focus their customer service initiatives on increasing first call resolution, reducing average hold time, and properly training their agents to handle their customer’s needs without handing them off.

To accomplish these goals, there are several initiatives that contact centres can work towards:

1. Improve Service Quality

The primary element of good customer service is that your interactions with your customers need to be effective and efficient. This can include improving:

Agent accessibility refers to how easy it is for a customer to reach an agent. This includes analytic metrics such as how long customers are kept waiting, call abandonment rates, how often they are put on hold after speaking with agents, and how many transfers they undergo before the situation is resolved.
IVR software can reduce wait times and improve service quality. Interactive voice can also include features such as callbacks, VIP routing, and implementing a queue waiting limit to minimize the time your customers will be listening to dead air or music.
- Your IVR should also be easy to navigate and use multi-level functions that allows for customized responses and prompts.
Skill based routing directs callers to appropriate departments based on IVR selections, contact history, and agent skill with the goal of first contact resolution.

2. Increase Agility of Service

Providing quality service is the first step, but loyalty can only be created if your customers have faith that you can effectively handle their complaints.

Your business should optimize the support structure for callers to make sure there aren’t unnecessary transfers, which have the tendency to frustrate callers, increase average handle time and decrease first call resolution.
Your agents should be given the power to solve issues that may arise in billing, returns, refunds, and more without needing to transfer customers to management.
Customers increasingly use multiple channels for outreach, including Internet, live chat, social media, and phones, so businesses should deliver service on multiple channels to meet their customers where they are.
If you provide 24/7 service across all or some of your contact channels, make it clearly known to your customers. Likewise, it is even more important to make it known when you don’t provide service 24/7 so service support expectations are clearly set and visible. Your customers experience will no doubt be off to a poor start if they reach out to you and your contact centre is closed.

3. Enhanced Agent Abilities

With the frustration that customers feel when transferred from agent to agent, it makes sense that properly trained agents are a critical part of building customer loyalty.

A comprehensive overview of the customer is required here to quickly and effectively meet their needs. Gather information from CRM systems and data metrics you already have in place so your agents are well-equipped from the start of an interaction. Finally, make sure agents are trained in providing creative problem resolution and have the autonomy to address each customer’s needs effectively.

The impact that the customer experience has on loyalty is substantial. Consumers aren’t always willing to give businesses multiple chances at meeting their needs, so if you’re interested in fostering loyalty, you’ll need to get it right on the first attempt and focus on building a value-driven relationship with your customers. This can be done by improving the efficiency of your business while keeping the needs of your consumers in mind, all with the end goal of providing a better overall customer experience.

Curious about how else customer loyalty can be influenced by their experience? Check out our free white paper!