For years, the anonymous nature of the Internet has led to uncertainty around who/what found online can be trusted. Fake identities, anonymous information, unverified facts and the impersonal nature of digital content has led to the overtly sarcastic outlook, “I saw it on the internet, so it must be true.”
This in part has led to some skepticism among consumers, which poses a challenge for even the most reputable businesses. However, improved customer service appears to be a remedy for uncertainty and lacking trust.
An eMarketer survey from January gauged internet user attitudes towards customer service finding that 89% said good service makes them feel more positive about a brand. Based on conversations from LSA16 last week, local marketing providers, well aware of this sentiment, are refocusing on building trust and relationships via customer service.
Many of the organizations represented at LSA16 talked about how they are bolstering sophisticated uses of technology and automation with more human, customer service related initiatives. Churn rates are a major problem in the space and many LSA16 speakers talked about how better customer service is an important solution to this problem.
That is not to say new tech and automation aren’t as important. Instead, the industry seems to be recognizing that even the most sophisticated, helpful technologies require an element of customer service in order to be successful and limit customer churn. Customer service isn’t a new idea, but there is a definite industry-wide shift towards improving it across the board, and particularly for SMB customers.
At LSA16 last week, ReachLocal talked about how they have transitioned the focus of its service model from media delivery to a client-centric model, boosting retention by 50% in one year. In other words, the company is building trust and relationships via excellent customer service, which is leading to better retention rates.
This strategy was reinforced by Alignable CEO Eric Groves who said that SMBs can trust large brands, but this only happens when these brands invest in building relationships with their clients. In his eyes, a compelling indicator of trust, is the net promoter score (NPS), citing an example of GoDaddy who had lower scores for individual products but robust customer service gave the company a strong overall NPS.
A panel of PPC experts from AdMax Local, MatchCraft, Acquisio and Kenshoo said that when it comes to managing PPC campaigns, customer service is a major influencer of trust, and therefore retention. And from Google’s perspective, returning customers are much more likely to buy more or increase spend.
James Kane, speaker, author and researcher, gave an inspiring and extremely interesting presentation on the psychology and neuroscience behind loyalty, saying that creating a sense of trust is a key pillar to loyalty. He said that the human brain looks for patterns, or things that we can trust and understand and that people don’t judge experiences by outcome, but by process. This challenges the notion that ROI is the most important factor of retention.
The final session at LSA16 with panelists from Tiger Pistol, DialogTech, Yahoo and Milestone Internet Marketing talked about how hard it is for differentiation in the local space given the way technology has leveled the playing the field. The panel felt customer service and building relationships was one of the most important ways to differentiate and bring more humanity to this digitally driven industry.
The local marketing space isn’t departing from technology, but is rediscovering the importance of customer service. The two, technology and service, work together to create a synergy not possible with an emphasis on just one or the other. As customer service improves, it will be interesting to see how churn data is impacted over time.
