Beware: Your website may be bleeding your customer service budget dry and destroying a lot of customer experiences. Here’s what researchers found:
An average retailer has about 2.8 million unresolved customer service visits to their websites each year — and nearly three-quarters of them could end up in another service channel, where it costs much more to resolve.
The Forrester Research, Inc., report shows that when customers can’t find the answers they want on a website, the costs add up quickly for the site owner. The estimates for an average retailer look like this:
- 37% of unresolved website interactions escalate to phone calls (1,036,000 calls x $7 = $7.3 million)
- 23% of unresolved website interactions escalate to email (644,000 emails x $6.50 = $4.2 million)
- 11% of unresolved website interactions escalate to chat (308,000 chats x $5 = $1.5 million)
Clean it up
Sure, the estimates might be a little high for the majority of companies and their websites, but the study points to the most important point: If customers can’t get the answers they want on your website, they’ll make more costly calls or send emails to the company. What’s worse, most issues are often small, and take agents’ time from handling the bigger, more complex issues.
To make your website’s customer service information more useful:
- Update it weekly. Make sure the Frequently Asked Questions reflect the most current inquiries you receive on the phone, online and through email, posting them in order of most popular to least asked.
- Use customers’ language. Customers will be able to search and find what they want more easily if everything is worded in the same kinds of phrases they use.
- Give additional resources. Allow customers to click through to more information in YouTube videos, downloadable manuals and blogs where other customers share ideas.
