It Only Takes A Moment To Win (Or Lose) Customers

By Charles Sujansky, CEO, KEYGroup

more critical than ever. Those organizations with a reputation for excellent customer service are the ones that tend to thrive in bad times. By the same token, those companies saddled with poor customer service are more likely to struggle or go under when the going gets rough.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that customer service is, for most businesses, the key to maintaining a competitive edge. However, customer relationships can be extremely tentative. It may take years for an organization to build a positive, productive and profitable relationships with customers, only to have one of  those relationships destroyed in a mere moment. While it may not be impossible to win back an offended customer after a bad encounter, the chances are that customer could be lost forever!

But customer service isn’t just a relationship issue … it’s also a bottom line issue! Recent research shows that organizations with superior customer service tend to out-perform their competitors by up to 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth. In other words, the customers of top organizations buy more items, spend more money, return for new business more often, and stick around longer.