CorpComms Magazine

Companies or brands who provide bad customer service will lose customers as a direct result if they do not manage their social media channels efficiently, according to a recent study by customer management specialists Convergys.

The 2011 'Customer Service Scorecard' research revealed that almost eight out of ten respondents who heard about another customer's bad experience with a company via social media stopped or avoided doing future business with them.

Eight out of ten respondents said that they told their friends or colleagues if they received bad customer service from a company. And 16 per cent did so via social media, while eight per cent shared their experience via text message. Bad news has the ability to go viral as the average Facebook user has 130 'friends'.

More than one third of respondents (35 per cent) said that they had read a social media post about a bad customer experience over the past six months.

Convergys found that customers are 4.6 times more likely to stay loyal to a company if their last interaction with them was either 'very or extremely satisfying'. Half of respondents said that they would be dissatisfied with customer service if a problem took too long to be resolved, and 48 per cent said that they would feel the same if any issues were not resolved the first time they contacted the company. Just under half said that they would consider it bad service if they could not understand the service representative.

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