Customer service executives often trust their experience and intuition around customer tolerance when managing their organization’s customer service operations, and specifically contact centers. But there is a downside to this approach: pulling one lever too far might result in an unexpectedly negative impact to customer satisfaction—one that is hard to recover from and may result in churn.
In 2012, Accenture conducted primary customer tolerance research to provide insight into the pivotal question about how much customers will put up with before loyalty slips—and what organizations can do to recover effectively from service failures. Covering the United States and Mexico, the research tested customer tolerance to determine the critical service elements that most impact tolerance across five key industries.
With this groundbreaking research, customer service executives can understand the factors behind customer tolerance and make data-driven decisions about which service attributes to emphasize, such as first call resolution, overall wait time, overall handle experience, number of handoffs or offer effectiveness.
The research results can also help organizations identify industry-specific issues that trigger customers to call for service, such as billing issues or incorrect reservations. With this knowledge, companies can proactively apply the correct service recovery tactics to maintain customer loyalty.