Customer Service Is Crucial in a Downturn

Results of Accenture's global survey of B-to-B customer service illustrate the fault lines between disgruntled buyers and bewildered sellers

By Brian Sprague

In this time of economic turmoil, when companies are fighting to hold onto every bit of business they can, nobody can afford to lose customers by providing substandard service and support. Yet like the economy itself these days, business-to-business customer support is plagued by disloyalty and disconnects. To fix this dysfunctional situation and to achieve high performance, companies have to sharpen their focus on improving the customer experience.

Consider the situation in the global electronics and communications businesses, both equipment and services. Last year around the world an astonishing 30% of companies switched vendors due to poor customer service, costing the companies they ditched, on average, $15 million each in lost business.

Global Survey's Disturbing Results

What's more, many high-tech companies manage their support offerings so poorly that they don't even know which services customers have purchased and which are meant to be offered for free. The result: Some 28% of the customer support they gave away last year should have been paid for by the recipients.

A vivid illustration of this disconnect between buyers and suppliers is that most businesses rate their own service more highly than their customers do. Worse, they underperform in delivering the support services their customers value the most. All too often, the outcome is lost business.

These troublesome findings surfaced in a recently completed Accenture (ACN) research project that consisted of two simultaneous online global surveys—one examining providers of customer service and the other querying the recipients of those services. In all, roughly 900 executives were surveyed from 12 countries: Argentina, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, and the U.S. Regional evaluations were also made for Latin America, North America, Europe, and Asia.

Regional Differences

A few high-level takeaways: By region, North Americans are the most loyal customers when they receive superior customer service; Asians are the least loyal—whether the service is superior or inferior.

The Chinese have the highest switching rate (55%) due to poor customer service; Argentinians have the lowest (7%). The U.S. ranked seventh, at 22%. Meanwhile, Latin Americans lag in customer service technology and training compared with the other three regions.

More French have considered switching (44%) than the other European countries surveyed. In training and technology Britain lags far behind the other European countries queried. Indians have highly inflated evaluations of the quality of customer service they provide compared with how well their customers evaluate them. And the Japanese are the toughest self-critics of the quality of their customer service.

Delving deeper into regional findings, several intriguing contrasts materialized. Some 36% of Asians have switched business customer-service providers in the past year due to poor customer service, more than Europeans (26%), North Americans (21%), and Latin Americans (18%). Reasons for this include rising expectations of Asian customers and their comparatively lagging customer service capabilities.

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