Email, Chat Still Preferred Forms of Customer Support
Chennai, India, October 30, 2014: Freshdesk, the world’s leading customer support software in the SaaS market, has released new findings that ‘Poor customer support isn’t just bad for a company’s image – it can actually kill sales deals. The insights were culled from interviews with more than 350 sales, marketing, IT and customer support professionals attending the just completed Dreamforce 2014 Conference in San Francisco. More than 60% of Dreamforce attendees have lost a sale due to poor Customer Support Experience.
The survey’s findings include:
- Poor Customer Support Is A Deal Killer—more than 75 percent of business professionals have personally cut ties with a company over a bad customer support experience in the past year. Likewise, more than 70% of sales people say their company has lost a customer or sale due to a poor performance or reputation related to customer support.
- Customer Support Heroes Can Strengthen Customer Relationships—nearly nine out of ten respondents (87 percent) said that a good interaction with a customer support professional positively changed their impression of a company’s brand.
- All Hands on Deck—57 percent of respondents said they feel responsible for customer success within their own organizations despite it not being in their primary job description.
- Support by Email, Phone and Chat Dominate—despite the growing popularity of social platforms like Twitter and Facebook for customer engagement, email (52 percent), phone (47 percent) and chat (22 percent) remain the most popular communications channels for concerns or complaints.
“Dreamforce attracted more than 100,000 IT, sales, marketing and customer support professionals, giving us the opportunity to measure how these insiders regard the customer support function when it comes to customer acquisition and retention,” said Dilawar Syed, president of Freshdesk. “The results are clear: customer service has a critical impact on the top line for organizations of all sizes. Our survey found that professionals in multiple functions across the organization felt responsible for customer success and the company’s service reputation.”
