Signs You Should Grow Your Investment in Customer Service

When it comes time to reinvest in your business, it can be hard to know what part of your company has the most immediate need for precious resources. That’s why ecommerce retailers often struggle with figuring out when to grow their investment in customer service.

Many brands relegate customer service to just one more moving part under customer experience instead of prioritizing it as a major focus. In fact, successfully improving your experiences is impossible if brands don’t follow a service-led approach and stay vigilant of opportunities for improvement. In particular, let’s look at why companies should invest in customer service, along with what those major indicators look like when it’s time to dedicate more resources.

Why Invest in Customer Service?

Investing in customer service means investing in the tools that drive brand loyalty, helping build lasting relationships that earn recurring business.

According to the 2022 Customer Expectations Report, nearly a third of shoppers (32%) said they would “fall in love” with a brand that has great service. This brand affection derived from quality experiences is what makes shoppers stick with brands for the long term and tell their friends about them.

Signs to Invest in Customer Service

Sometimes it’s not always clear when to reinvest in your company, but these unmistakable signs indicate that your customer service could use some upgrades.

Customers are dealing with long wait times

A simple metric to keep an eye on is average wait time (AWT), which measures the delay shoppers have to deal with before their issue is resolved. This is more specific than average resolution time (ART), which takes into account the entirety of a customer’s interaction with an agent, all the way through a solution. If AWT is too high, this can indicate that there’s a lack of resources rather than a lack of productivity because agents are too caught up with other tasks.

What to do: Getting AWT down can either be solved by hiring more agents or expanding your channel capabilities. For the latter, bolstering self-service can make your customers feel like they can solve their problems themselves and thus avoid unnecessary wait times altogether.

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Agents are overwhelmed by volume

High service volume leads to stressed agents who have a much harder time maintaining a positive customer experience. If you don’t provide agents with the resources they need to respond to customer requests effectively, that backlog will create undue stress causing downstream effects on how shoppers perceive your business.

What to do: Invest in your agents by giving them technology that lets them do more. The right tools will help them access customer information and brand and product knowledge, as well as allow them to collaborate with coworkers so they have less trouble getting through their daily call volume.

Sales are plateauing

Spending resources on customer acquisition is becoming too expensive for brands looking to grow sustainably. When sales plateau, investing in your customer service is a great way to build customer loyalty, enhancing the value of each existing customer while also creating opportunity for new sales from repeat shoppers.

What to do: Empowering your agents to apply a more personalized approach to customer service might take a bit more investment, but it will pay dividends. Give your support center the knowledge and capability to upsell and cross-sell customers to create incremental sales and turn your customer service team into a revenue-generating powerhouse.

Your brand isn’t generating any word-of-mouth buzz

Word-of-mouth referrals are an essential and affordable way to acquire new customers. Bolstering your customer service can help you create the organic buzz that grows your business. In fact, the 2022 Customer Expectations Report found that 59% of consumers would recommend a brand to a friend because of a positive customer service experience.

What to do: The key to creating a positive, buzzy customer experience boils down to making each shopper feel like the service they receive is personalized. To do so, invest in a platform that can maintain the long-term and omnichannel record of a customer’s conversations and shopping behavior. That way, no matter where or when they reach out, any agent can pick up the conversation and make that customer feel like a valued shopper.

Making an Investment in Customer Service With Gladly

How you make your investment in customer service can differ depending on which of the above issues resonates most with your brand. But Gladly has the scalable pricing model and comprehensive, out-of-the-box toolkit that makes it a worthwhile investment, no matter the size and maturity of your ecommerce business.

How KURU Footwear invested in customer service

For instance, at KURU Footwear, an old-school, ticket-based system made delivering quality service particularly tricky. They refocused their investment on a conversation-driven platform in Gladly, putting their resources into building a unified view of each customer while adding on powerful new AI features for improved personalization. The results speak for themselves: increased sales to customers with high-purchase intent and a 3x reduction in abandoned call rate in less than three months.

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