A recent study conducted by Genesys in collaboration with leading industry analysts at Datamonitor/Ovum shows that poor customer service is costing US businesses $83 billion annually! Most businesses are aware that excellent customer service positively impacts their bottom line, but fewer than one third of businesses have any way of tracking or measuring revenue per call or how much revenue is lost with an unhappy customer. And yet, the only thing that many large and small companies focus on is whether they are delivering first class customer service. Companies such as Nikon, Black and Decker, Southwest Airlines, Fed Ex, and ServiceMaster are spending millions to monitor and improve customer support because they know the cost in losing customers.

Almost two thirds of customers end a relationship with one company and deflect to another company within the same industry, causing individual companies to lose $50.6 billion each year. Not accounted for in the survey is the high cost of another company in the industry to gain that customer.

However, about a third abandon the relationship altogether, causing the entire industry to lose $32.4 billion annually. While some industries are essential to the well-being of the consumer, others become "unneeded" if the consumer is upset with the level of service.

For every 10 interactions, the customer will end a relationship with a company! The average value of each lost relationship is $289 per year.
Two amazing numbers from this study:
- 40% of consumers said it is critical to provide more intelligent self-service to reach a human so they are not trapped in automated systems.
- 90.5% of consumers would welcome proactive engagement to improve their experience through extended offers or help during self-service transactions.

Conversely, 78% of American consumers say their most satisfying experience occurred because of a capable and competent customer service representative.

These numbers are staggering, but what do they mean to your business on a day-to-day basis? How can you improve? How can you keep satisfied customers?

Most people are happy with their experiences with live agents, Web chat, and Web self-service conducted with a quality help desk software. Therefore, those are areas in which the current products and practices are working.

Consumers want consistency and continuity. Those are easily achievable with good customer service software. Consumers want improved personalization. That includes proactivity and outreach. For example, if they are stuck in automated service for a specified period, they would love to have an agent break in and assist them or for there to be a "chat" button to click to talk with an agent. It would be even better if that agent already had whatever information they had inputted into the system so they would not have to repeat it.

Consumers want to be valued. They want their time respected and they want their issues resolved politely in a short amount of time. This might mean submitting a "help ticket" using an automated help desk software system and receiving an e-mail with instructions about how they can fix the issue or talk to someone that can. Or it might include being able to schedule a time with a help desk agent that knows how to fix the problem. These days there is software that easily allows a technician at Dell Computers to log onto your desktop, see the network environment that you are connected to, fix the problem by loading up a software patch from their customer support software, click a few places on your computer and the Dell agent is finished. All you had to do was sit there and watch. The first time that I saw this take place, I was duly impressed with the lengths they had gone to make it easy on the help desk agent and me, the customer.

And I may not be Dell’s biggest fan due to the offshore debacle they produced several years ago, but I am obviously one of their stronger supporters when asked about their service. And that has to be worth something, right?