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At one point or another, any small business owner will go through a little financial crisis. During this crisis, the following question will pop up: whether or not the money he spends on his company’s customer service is being spent correctly. It certainly is a good question. We all know that good customer service leads to loyalty - but how much money are we missing out on when we don’t cherish our customers? And how can we avoid bad customer service in these social times?

Get rid of your bad customer service frown

Every company out there boasts of providing topnotch customer service. But thinking you do and actually providing it are two entirely different things. So if you want to ward off losing your customers – and by extension losing revenue – you need to turn your bad customer service frown upside down. Various studies have been carried out to test the best ways for businesses to get their customers spend more money there. One study suggests that high temperatures decrease customers’ willingness to spend money. Another suggests that customers hate to part with cash compared to credit. Avoid bad word of mouth Word of mouth was a powerful marketing tool even before the social networking websites came to play. The importance of people saying good things about your company has now become mammoth; a mere negative tweet on your feed or an ‘unlike’ can decrease your business. The fact of the matter is that a negative review hurts your reputation ten times more than a positive pat on the back. On average a disappointed customer tells 16 other potential clients of yours about your bad service. Yet a satisfied customer will only inform 9 people about your awesome business etiquette. Also, an American Express surveyfound that 78% of Americans have backed out of a transaction because of bad customer service. Not surprisingly, 9 out of 10 American consumers say that they would willingly pay more money just to ensure good customer service. Just as good customer service makes a brand, bad customer service can destroy them. Take customer service seriously Bad customer service doesn’t just make you lose one client whose query you haven’t yet answered. Its impact follows you around everywhere: on social networking sites and on online forums. Whoever searches on your company’s name comes across quotes that discredit your company. Not just 16. More like 16.000, if your company is a well-known one. So how much does bad customer service really cost? According to some sources, it comes down to $338.5 billion worldwide. That’s a yearly average. But badly serviced customers are likely to avoid doing business with you for 2 or more years – so those $338.5 billion are a cautious estimation. Gain more happy customers I think I made my point by now: you do not want bad customer service. You just don’t. Thankfully you’re not on your own: there are lots of customer support tools out there to help you out. Most are in potential really, really good – but they’re usually also really, really complicated. You don’t need half of the features they come with, yet you’re forced to pay for all those features. Somehow, it doesn’t seem very cost-efficient. Discover Casengo, the tool we’ve been working on for a year now. We’re slowly growing an audience, because Casengo’s fundaments were built with its end-users in mind: ambitious small business owners and their customer support team (some of these teams are just 2 extra pairs of hands, some have 20+ members). The Casengo plugin for WordPress is being downloaded about 100 times a day (which is quite something, considering we don’t spend any big money on marketing). So why do SMEs like Casengo? Because our super simple customer support software helps you bring in more happy customers easily. Sign up here. Use as many agents as you want for 30 days; discover it all for nothing. And afterwards, the first agent is and will always be free! Casengo: simple, solid, beautiful.