The present state of rising inflation is making clients all over the world extra frugal, and it’s impacting each B2B and B2C markets—and inflicting many corporations to view deliberate investments with extra warning and even delay them. When new enterprise turns into tough in such occasions, new analysis from enterprise service administration agency OTRS Group affirms that good customer support can’t solely guarantee secure and good buyer relationships, but in addition 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 numerous features of customer support. The primary installment of the three-part sequence exhibits 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 important for buyer retention and satisfaction
This was confirmed within the survey, the place individuals had been requested to fee the significance of customer support because it pertains to buyer retention on a scale of 1 (no function) to five (essential function). An awesome 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 individuals.
Freedom to behave makes buyer assist sturdy
To have the ability to assist clients successfully, you want a customer support group that may not solely supply options, however ideally implement these immediately. 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 so on.: 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 adjustments to the shopper account. Customer support is thus strengthened by autonomy and freedom of resolution.
Cross-departmental cooperation results in better buyer satisfaction
Even when customer support is of nice significance to the standard of the shopper 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 anticipate the service group to attract the shopper’s consideration to extra services or products throughout their contact. Thus, among the many survey individuals, 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 assist and automatic processes
However what helps corporations enhance collaboration and communication between customer support and different departments? Clear administration assist for cross-functional work on the shopper 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 consultants (27.6 p.c) are cited for this function.
“The primary OTRS Highlight on Buyer Service exhibits, on the one hand, the central function 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. “However it additionally exhibits how good collaboration with different departments strengthens customer support groups. Automating such cross-functional processes with options like OTRS supplies 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 assist from management and administration stays important for this.”
