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January 27, 2014

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Customer Service


The importance of customer service has always been important, but has been especially emphasized in an era of viral content. One bad customer experience can spread throughout the Internet in a matter of minutes, potentially damaging a brand’s name, reputation, customer relationships and future sales. Technology and solutions are available to help customer service representatives cater to customer demands, but as real-time, instantaneous support grows to be the norm, companies need to truly understand what customers expect and how to meet and exceed these expectations.

Dimensional Research, on behalf of Zendesk, recently released an infographic regarding the good, the bad and the ugly of customer service – the role of first impressions, social media, demographics and sharing habits, and how they all impact a company’s impression on customers.

The good news: 24 percent of respondents say they will continue to seek out vendors for two or more years after good customer experiences. The bad news: 39 percent of respondents will avoid a company for two or more years after a bad customer experience.

Some other interesting results from the infographic include sharing habits after a customer service experience. Respondents were more likely to share bad experiences (95 percent) than good ones (87 percent) with others. High-income households are most likely (79 percent) to avoid vendors for two or more years after bad customer service experiences, followed by Generation X (54 percent), B2B (51 percent) and women (45 percent).

Customer service is one of the biggest areas to see an impact from WebRTC, a technology enabling real-time communication over the browser. As companies try to set themselves apart by providing multichannel support, they are realizing the benefits of optimizing their support teams and website by providing WebRTC-based solutions. Live chat is already becoming a standard feature across websites, especially those that emphasize real-time contact with company representatives, and WebRTC is expanding those features to video and audio calling, screen sharing and more.

There are some challenges with customer service and WebRTC, but as consumers become more accustomed with real-time interactions online, they will soon expect and demand it from customer service and support teams. WebRTC will be discussed in more depth at this week’s Enterprise WebRTC Pavilion, collocated with ITEXPO in Miami, Fla. The Pavilion will cover standards, development tools, use cases, product demonstrations and more from industry analysts, companies and developers.

In addition to the Pavilion, there will be sessions focusing on WebRTC and customer service and social media. “What WebRTC Means for Customer Service” will feature speakers from Bolder Thinking, LiveOps and Ifbyphone and will cover the best and most likely areas of success for WebRTC in customer service. On Wednesday, Jan. 28, featuring speakers from BMC Software and Five9, “Why Social is Critical to Customer Satisfaction” will cover how business can use the power of social media to improve brand recognition, customer engagement and ROI.

The full conference program for ITEXPO can be found here.

Check out the full infographic below:




Edited by Ryan Sartor
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