Customer Experiences Prevail (Again) in New Studies

According to some recent studies, great customer service and brand experiences are the main drivers of purchase decisions.

This, of course, is something we’ve written about time and again. So it’s not really news to us (or to you, if you’ve been checking in on our blogs occasionally), but the findings are just as exciting and an extra jolt of validation for our experience-driven philosophy.

So, let’s just dig right in, shall we?

A new Harris Poll shows that consumers will spend one-third of their disposable income on brands that provide great customer experience. If you do the math, that’s about $30 billion available every month to brands that prioritize great customer service.

The Harris Poll study, which was commissioned by Lithium Technologies, indicates that consumers will spend more on an “inferior” product from a brand that prioritizes customer service. Drilling down a bit, 43 percent said they’d purchase a lesser product from a brand they had a positive experience with, and nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of respondents said they’d spend more on a product from a brand they love. On the flip side, 71 percent said they would probably not use a brand again after just one negative experience, and 44 percent would go the extra step and share their bad experience with their peers.

“When two-thirds of consumers say they are unwilling to stick with a brand that has treated them badly even if they love the brand’s products, it’s time to sit up and take notice,” said Rob Tarkoff, president and CEO of Lithium Technologies. “Brands need to dig deeper to understand how they can create awesome experiences for their customers across platforms.”

Similarly, the new “State of Online Reviews” poll by Podium shows that nearly 70 percent of consumers (68 percent) will pay up to 15 percent more for a product if they know they’ll have a great experience.

Clearly, great customer experience is king. And when those great customer experiences are shared in online reviews, the benefit to brands can be huge.

That same Podium study shows that reviews impact the purchase decisions for 93 percent of consumers, and 60 percent of respondents said they scour reviews each week.

When consumers are looking at these reviews, they’re also going beyond the star rating and into the review content itself. According to the Podium study, 82 percent of consumers say the review verbatims have convinced them to make (or not make) a purchase.

To us, the review content (not just the star rating) is the holy grail—and the precise reason we developed emotive[x].

While there is a lot to digest in these various studies that came out recently, the takeaways for brands are pretty simple:

1. When you deliver great customer experiences, you will be rewarded with their brand loyalty and increased revenue (remember that $30 billion up for grabs each month?).
2. Those great experiences will translate into more (and better) online customer reviews, which we know are a major influencer of consumers’ purchase decisions.
3. It’s OK (and necessary) to ask your customers for reviews, but be sure to do so tactfully.

And remember: If you build it, they will come.