How your customers experience your company directly impacts your brand reputation. This encompasses the whole customer journey, from initial contact through to sale and post-sale customer support.
At every point of the journey, customer service shapes the image the customer develops around your brand.
In this article, you’ll learn why customer service can make or break your brand reputation and how a service desk plays a crucial role in that.
What is brand reputation?
Brand reputation is how the public perceives your company in terms of service and ethics This includes customers but also other stakeholders, such as suppliers.
A good reputation establishes a brand’s credibility, trustworthiness and reliability. It can attract new customers, build loyalty among current customers and position your brand as a leader in your industry.
A strong brand reputation is rooted in outstanding service that consistently meets or exceeds your customers’ expectations.
What is a customer service desk?
A service desk is a point of contact for customers to report issues, request assistance and access information. Service desks tend to be for technical troubleshooting and IT support compared to a help desk, which may focus on a broader range of customer service issues, one of which may be technical support.
The key responsibilities of a service desk:
- Incident management – logging, managing, and resolving customer queries.
- Service request management – responding to requests for information, resources or services.
- Problem management – identifying the root cause of system failures and implementing solutions to prevent a recurrence.
- Change management – managing changes or upgrades to IT services and infrastructure with minimal impact on customers.
- Service level monitoring: Monitoring service performance against your service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure your services continue to meet the agreed targets.
How much influence does customer service have on brand reputation?
Much of how a brand develops a good or bad reputation is through word of mouth and social proof. Social proof is when other customers leave reviews or testimonials about their experience with a company.
With that in mind, consider the following brand reputation statistics.
- 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
- 75% of consumers trust a company more if it has positive reviews.
- 49% of consumers need at least a four-star rating before they will consider using a business.
- Every additional one-star Yelp rating can potentially increase a company’s revenue by 5-9%, according to a research study by Harvard Business School.
Source: Reputation X
So, it’s clear that customers value good service, so much so that reading negative reviews about a brand will make many not want to use that business again.
How a customer service desk can positively impact brand reputation
So, let’s look at how an efficient customer service desk can contribute to a positive brand reputation.
1. Enhances the customer experience
We’ve all experienced the frustration of poor after-sales support. Difficulty accessing customer service agents, long call queues, or emails that go unanswered.
You may have an excellent sales process for purchases, but if your post-sales support is weak, it can ruin the customer experience in its entirety to the point that the customer never does business with you again.
Even long-standing customers will opt out if they experience bad customer service. A survey by Emplifi found that 63% of participants said they would abandon a brand because of poor customer experience. Eighty-six percent said they would leave a brand they were once loyal to after only two to three bad experiences.
An efficient customer service desk can enhance the customer experience if it offers the following:
- Easy access via multiple communication channels. The latest customer service desk software offers omnichannel support. This means customers can reach out to your business via multiple channels. This could include email, phone calls, live chat, social media or website contact forms.
- A ticketing system that automatically tags, categorizes and routes a query to the relevant support agent. This means the customer can get support faster without time wasted being shuttled from one agent to another.
- Self-service options for immediate assistance. This can include a knowledge base, a frequently asked questions list, video tutorials and troubleshooting guides.
- Automation and AI capabilities that allow you to automate commonly requested tasks like password resets and other basic troubleshooting queries. This provides immediate assistance to customers and frees up IT agents to attend to more complex issues.
2. Builds trust and brand loyalty through consistent problem-solving support
Customers tend to return to the brands that are consistent. Consistent in quality, consistent in service and consistent in problem-solving support. They want assurance that should they experience a problem with a product or service they can count on you to resolve the matter quickly and with minimal friction.
Customers also want the security of knowing that should your company experience a technical problem you will communicate it to them timeously and keep them updated on the progress of fixing it.
This level of consistency is what gains customers’ trust, which, in turn, builds brand loyalty.
A loyal customer returns to buy from you again and shares their positive experience with others. Remember what we said about social proof? When customers advocate for your brand, it attracts more customers.
3. Reinforces brand values
If your brand values include operating with integrity and being customer-centric, your customer service should reflect that.
For example, if your customer service creed is to respond within 24 hours and you take a week instead, your customers will feel lied to and start to distrust your brand.
Brand values are important to customers, particularly younger customers, who tend to prefer brands with values that match theirs.
4. Provides 24-hour access to customer support
When customers experience technical problems, they usually want it fixed as soon as possible. That means they need access to your company when the problem arises, any time of the day or night.
If your service desk doesn’t operate 24 hours a day, you can provide self-service solutions as a first point of reference. These may include a knowledge base or an AI chatbot. AI-enabled chatbots are accessible 24 hours a day and can help resolve minor issues without having to speak to an agent.
If the issue is beyond the chatbot’s capabilities, the bot can forward the query to your service desk team who can contact the customer the next morning.
5. Leverage customer support data for business insights
Data has become the backbone of business decisions today. Many service desk systems collect a vast amount of data that you can tap into to determine customer sentiment.
This includes:
- service desk agent performance
- query resolution times
- the types of incidents being reported
- customer satisfaction levels
A service desk should provide bi-directional communication between you and your customers. For example, live chat, two-way text messaging, and conversations on social media. By analyzing the data from interactions with your customers, you can apply data-driven insights to your marketing and business strategies.
You could also actively ask for feedback via surveys and polls. Customer insights attained through a feedback loop are valuable. They can support continuous improvements to your customer service, product development and brand positioning.
In Summary
Customer service plays an integral role in brand reputation. A positive customer experience can significantly boost your reputation, and a negative one can ruin it.
An efficient, well-managed service desk that expertly resolves queries can greatly improve customer confidence in your brand. This can reduce customer churn and grow a bigger customer loyalty base. And when loyal customers share their positive experiences – which many do – it’s likely to attract new customers.
