| Science and Research

Service creates growth – business success through happy customers

Service creates growth – business success through happy customers

Customer service is not just a cost factor – it is first and foremost a factor for success. That’s the conclusion of a current study. It shows how closely customer satisfaction and the positive development of a company are linked.

Companies have always been investing in sales and marketing with the aim of gaining new customers. But what happens then? What services do they offer to their customers? Often not many, according to the authors of the HubSpot “Customer Success Feeds Business Success” study, which surveyed 1,162 consumers in the USA, the UK and Ireland. The result is that not even every second customer believes that their experience with goods or services they have purchased are important for the company.

Gaining and retaining customers

This is interesting, because it is known to be significantly more expensive to acquire new customers than keep the existing ones. When faced with millions of vendors trying to earn the customers’ favor online, this is more difficult than ever. Some companies have already responded by focusing on improving the loyalty of their existing customers and turning them into “fans” or, even better, brand ambassadors. “Ensuring that customers are successful and satisfied creates a strong and efficient marketing channel for companies,” the study states. This is because 77% of respondents had had positive experiences with companies in the past year that they shared with others. 46%, for example, had drawn their friends attention to a company that they were happy with. 24% had recommended a company on social media, 20% had given a positive review on a consumer review website (multiple answers were possible).

The study also surveyed 752 executives in the US, the UK, Ireland, Mexico and Colombia and compared the service approach of the companies with their economic development. For growing businesses, 70% of respondents rated customer experience with products or services as very important. For companies with stagnant and declining sales, only 49% were of this opinion. “With the cost of acquiring new customers increasing, it is unlikely that companies who place little importance on their customers’ success, i.e. their satisfaction with products or services, will continue to grow,” is how the authors of the study put it. A strong service focus does not mean inefficiency – quite the opposite in fact, as 97% of the growing businesses place importance on cost efficiency.

And how do successful companies help ensure that their customers can use products or services as they wish and are satisfied with these offers? By investing in their provision of services. 55% of the growing businesses consider these investments to be very important, compared with 29% of stagnant companies. The focus of the successful businesses is to train their customer service staff well and to work with them over the long term. This saves the time and resources needed to recruit and train new customer advisors.

The bottom line

According to the study organizers, good service will increasingly become a unique selling point for companies and help attract new customers and retain existing customers for the long term. The authors of the study also explicitly point out further additional values; that customer service is the interface to the customer and can provide feedback on products or services. Therefore, the team not only ensures satisfied customers, but also gains valuable insights for the company.

The HubSpot “Customer Success Feeds Business Success” study is available here: https://research.hubspot.com/customer-success

Author: Editorial team Future. Customer.
Image: PHOTOMORPHIC PTE. LTD. – AdobeStock

Tags for this article CRM (108) Customer Experience (95) Customer Management (34)

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