After spending all that time and effort sourcing the perfect dropshipping product to sell and setting up your business, your online marketing strategy is finally in place, and the first sales are starting to come in.
Nevertheless, before you lay back and relax, there’s one key area of your business that you still need to tackle: customer service. This article will present ten customer service statistics all entrepreneurs must know when setting up their company’s customer service.
What is Customer Service?
Before diving into customer service statistics, we must first understand customer service.
Customer service is providing assistance and help to consumers before and after they carry out a purchase. This means it applies to prospective customers considering purchasing a product or service from you and customers who have already bought from you.
Why is Customer Service Important?
Good customer service is essential to growing your dropshipping business. As the following customer service statistics will show, the importance of customer service as part of your brand image and marketing and sales efforts must be addressed.
The interconnectedness means that one poor customer service experience can result in losing brand loyalty, customers, and sales.
So if you are ready, buckle up, and let us dive straight into the ten customer service statistics you need to know in 2023!
The Global Customer Experience Management Market Size
Let us look at just how big the customer experience market is.
According to a report by Fortune Business Insights, the customer experience management market worldwide was worth as much as $11.34 billion in 2022 (Fortune Business Insights, 2022). This was a 12.2 percent year-over-year increase from its value of $10.11 billion in 2021 and is expected to increase to $32.53 billion by 2029.
Over the coming years, the market is set to continue growing and sustain this impressive growth rate. Its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is expected at 16.2 percent from 2022 to 2029.
This growth is driven by the rising number of businesses adopting artificial intelligence and augmented reality to improve the customer experience for their buyers. Recognizing the importance of providing good customer service for customer retention and company presence, brands invest more in the tools and technologies to help them grow.
Customer Service Influences Purchase Decisions
If you think customer service is only aimed at solving problems for new customers, here is a statistic that proves otherwise: 81 percent of consumers say a positive customer service experience increases their chances of making another purchase (Zendesk, 2022).
That means that providing good customer service extends from the prospecting stage before consumers even purchase to way beyond it. It is also influential enough to deter buyers from or incentivize them to purchase from you.
Most consumers today view customer service as one of the top factors influencing their purchasing decisions. Seventy percent of them have decided to buy from a brand based on the quality of their customer service. As many as 78 percent would switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences.
Brand Loyalty Depends on Customer Service
As you set up your brand’s customer service, remember the following: Good customer service should continue even after the purchase has been carried out.
Providing good customer service helps to build customers’ trust in your brand. As this statistic will show, it is an added incentive for customers to return and is critical to increasing your customer’s lifetime value.
Ninety-four percent of consumers say a positive customer service experience encourages them to continue buying from the same brand (Salesforce, 2022). This is so much so that 80 percent of consumers say they are willing to forgive mistakes made by a company if they receive excellent customer service.
Since customer retention is generally cheaper than acquisition, consider building top-notch customer service to entice your existing customer pool and keep them coming back.
Importance of Human Touch
Despite the digital age in which we currently live, many consumers prefer human interactions when dealing with customer service.
According to a study, 36 percent of consumers prefer to wait to interact with an actual human representative when seeking customer service (CSG International, 2022). This is despite the availability of automated solutions like AI-powered virtual assistants. Eighty-three percent of those who contact a company expect to interact with someone immediately.
So while advances in automation and technology are there for businesses to use, human representatives should also be available to resolve customer service problems when needed. Not providing such an option can lead to frustration, which, as we will explore in the following customer service statistic, can be costly for businesses.
Cost of Poor Customer Service
Suppose the question, “Why is customer service important?” has ever crossed your mind as an ecommerce entrepreneur. In that case, you should pay particular attention to the following customer service statistic.
Where baseball lives by the mantra “three strikes, and you are out,” customer service is less forgiving. More than six out of ten consumers say they will stop buying from a company and switch to a competitor after just one poor customer service experience (Zendesk, 2022).
This reiterates the importance of customer service to the overall experience your brand offers your customers, who have no qualms about switching loyalties after just one bad experience.
The Worst Aspect of Poor Customer Service
If you are adopting the automated options available on the market, here is perhaps one of the most critical customer service statistics to be aware of when doing so – automated telephone systems are the bane of all customer service experiences, with more than half (56 percent) of all consumers listing it as the most frustrating part of any poor customer service experience (Zendesk, 2019).
In large part, their frustration at these automated systems stems from the difficulty they face in getting in touch with a human agent, which, as we have seen from a previous point, remains extremely important in the eyes of consumers.
Aside from automated telephone systems, the most disliked aspects of customer service include only being able to reach customer support at certain hours and repeating the same information multiple times. A survey by HubSpot shows that consumers loathe the latter so much that 62 percent of them would prefer to “hand out parking tickets.”
