Here's why.
A recent customer service benchmark study conducted by SuperOffice found the following rather concerning results:
- 62% of companies did not respond to a customer service request
- -90% of companies did not acknowledge an email has been received
- -97% of companies did not follow up with customers
- Only 20% of companies answered our questions in the first reply
- The average response time to handle a customer service request was 12 hours
How do you compare?
Now if your a company that cares about customers, and as such your customer experience delivery, you would surely find these results frightening, but do you know how you would stack up? And when was the last time you ate your own dogfood and tried some of your own service delivery for yourself?
A snippet from a recent article in CMO magazine by Catherine Anderson: Head of Marketing for Powershop Australia, provides a simple example of how partaking in the customer experience can produce positive returns.
"One weekend, a senior manager was monitoring Facebook. They noticed some people struggling with one of the forms on the website, completed the form themselves and realised how archaic it was, printed it on Monday and crossed off the stuff they couldn’t answer on the form but was mandatory. We realised we needed none of it. The form’s completion rate has now increased by 104 per cent."
Ask yourself
Eating your own dog food sounds easy and your top of mind answer might be 'I do that', but your business and processes change overtime, so maybe ask yourself when was the last time you did it?