What Bad Customer Service Costs Your Business [Infographic]

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” goes one of the most famous quotes in business.

And this line has also been one of the biggest problems in doing great customer service.

“But you can’t measure it!” is the response I receive from a lot of budding entrepreneurs when it comes to chatting about customer support.

And to be honest, it is tough to measure it. Yet the reason we place such huge importance on customer support as we develop Buffer’s social media management suite is altogether for a different reason. It’s to make people feel great, because this law exists:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Customer support is the very rare opportunity to connect to your customers on an emotional level. You can’t do that in any other way.

The true cost of bad customer service

Our friends over at HelpScout, which we use daily to help our customers out, have done a wonderful thing. They wanted to finally find out the true cost of doing little or bad customer service? And here are the answers, backed up with the latest studies and research.

To summarize briefly, here are the 3 most important facts about bad customer service:

• 78% of online customers recommend the brand to a friend after a great customer service experience.
• Only 10% of companies deliver great customer service – the room for your company to stand out is huge

Here is the full infographic:

Especially when also looking at the latest social media stats it’s becoming very clear that any customer has an impactful voice they can raise at any time. Doing bad customer service seems to become less and less of an option.

I’m curious about one thing: Which company have you had the best customer service interaction with in the past?