New Freshdesk survey shows 75% of respondents have personally ended relationships with a company due to poor customer support.
Poor customer support isn’t just bad for a company’s image – it can actually kill sales deals. That’s according to new findings from Freshdesk, a leading customer support software in the SaaS market.
The insights were culled from interviews with more than 350 sales, marketing, IT and customer support professionals attending the just completed Dreamforce 2014 Conference in San Francisco.
The survey’s findings include:
Poor Customer Support Is a Deal Killer
More than 75% of business professionals have personally cut ties with a company over a bad customer support experience in the past year. Likewise, more than 70% of sales people say their company has lost a customer or sale due to a poor performance or reputation related to customer support.
Customer Support Heroes Can Strengthen Customer Relationships
Nearly nine out of ten respondents (87%) said that a good interaction with a customer support professional positively changed their impression of a company’s brand.
All Hands on Deck
57% of respondents said they feel responsible for customer success within their own organizations despite it not being in their primary job description.
Support by Email, Phone and Chat Dominate-despite the growing popularity of social platforms like Twitter and Facebook for customer engagement, email (52%), phone (47%) and chat (22%) remain the most popular communications channels for concerns or complaints.
“Our data shows quite clearly that in today’s experience economy, reputation can have a significant impact on a business,” said Dilawar Syed, president, North America at FreshDesk.
“Users are no longer willing to tolerate bad support either professionally or personally. It only takes one bad experience with a company to damage the brand’s reputation indefinitely. If companies want to retain customers and attract new ones, they will put processes and technology in place to make sure that all issues and requests are resolved quickly and painlessly for every customer.”
