Quality Times

• How Important is One Phone Call?
• How We Measured the Impact of Customer Service

How Important is One Phone Call?

We all know that quality customer care is critical to the success of a business; but have you ever stopped to consider just how important a single phone call can be?

In our research, we've found that a single experience calling customer service has a dramatic effect on customers' opinions.

In many cases, this shift is so dramatic that companies may be better off investing in better customer service than in more marketing or advertising.

	After One Call 88% More Likely to Buy

After a single outstanding call, 88% more callers said they were likely to make a purchase from that company in the next 12 months.

In contrast, after a single very bad call, 56% fewer callers were likely to make a purchase in the next 12 months.

	After One Call 77% More Willing to Pay a Premium

Additionally, after a very positive call, callers were 77% more likely to be willing to pay a premium price.

What about the impact of customer service on brand loyalty?

Callers were 231% more likely to be favorably impressed with a company's customer service after an excellent experience, and 107% more likely to be favorably impressed with the company as a whole.

	After One Call 417% More Advertising Credibility

And there was a whopping 417% increase in the number of callers who believe that the company was actually better than its advertising!

These results were just as true for automated customer service as live agents, and prove the importance of ensuring that all callers receive a consistent, high-quality experience.

How We Measured the Impact of Customer Service

The statistics Rick Rappe cites in the above article are based on surveys we conducted of over 2,700 callers to five different companies. Each caller was asked about his or her opinions about the company, then asked to make a call to the company's customer service.

After the phone call, we surveyed the callers again, asking many of the same questions as in the first survey, and also several questions about the quality of the customer service experience. We correlated individual survey responses to recordings of each individual call.

By looking at opinion shifts among callers who reported a "Very Satisfactory" or "Very Dissatisfactory" experience, we were able to measure the impact of a single call on callers' opinions.