Businesses commonly lose 15-20% of their customers each year, but when you cut this in half, the average growth rate more than doubles. For example, a 5% change in the rate of retention – keeping more loyal customers – can increase profit 25-100%.

So goes the conventional wisdom put forth by Frederick Rieschheld, former director of Bain & Co.’s customer retention program and W. Earl Sasser, professor at Harvard Business School more than 15 years ago.

Despite its vintage, I would have to say that this is still the most powerful customer service research I’ve seen over the last couple of decades.

So why do most companies still let customer defections slide?

Tracking the real cost of customer defections

Regardless of the profit impact of reducing customer defections, accounting systems don’t capture the value of a defection prevented, reconsidered or reversed. Nor do businesses even track numbers of defections. As a result, executives vastly underestimate the cost of losing loyal customers. Most accounting systems focus on current-period cost and revenues, ignoring expected cash flows over the lifetime of a customer.

So how should you go about proving that reducing customer defection and cultivating more loyal customers can significantly contribute to your business’ bottom line? You need to develop a defection management program.

A case study

My company conducted a survey of large Plasma Group to determine impact of defections. This center operates from 17 locations with some 300 employees. We found that annual “value” of each donor was $5,035.88.

The statistics were based on these findings:

We also found:

Whenever a single donor defected, lifetime loss to the plasma group was $18,040. One donor!

Making the case for a defection management program

Determine your current annual defection rate. Determine the life of a loyal customer and how much they spend each year over their customer lifetime. Then calculate your total loss in sales and your total profit loss – and then the grand total of all losses. At this point you will probably have cardiac arrest. The losses for most firms will be in the millions. Enter the necessary detail into this formula:

1. Compare the cost of acquiring a new, loyal customer (includes marketing, advertising, sales, etc.).
2. Assemble employees, supervisors, and managers into focus groups charged with the task of listing the causes for defection. When a steady customer drops out, call and ask the reason for the defection.
3. Interview front-line employees. They see customers come and go and they usually know the primary causes for defections. You can also send surveys to former customers, including an inducement for them to reply. Telephone and in-person interviews with defecting customers are also effective.
4. Monitor conversations on social media to see what people are saying about your product/service and why they are no longer happy with your company.

Implementing a defection management program

1. Create SWAT teams. Assemble an action group of your most proficient employees. Their job: to contact defecting customers and to persuade them to give the company another chance.
2. List actions to reduce defections. Prepare a list for individuals, for departments, and for the entire organization.
3. Train employees. Implement expanded quality service training (or new approach or content) every six months, since employees will not change customer service practices for life in reaction to one-shot training. Train the entire work force. Cost of training is a small fraction of potential growth in sales and profit.
4. Maintain momentum. Issue monthly reports of declines in defection rate and monetary savings related to defection rate. Share this with the entire workforce.
5. Recognize, praise, and compensate. Reward those employees who have been responsible for a zero defection rate. Usually, I focus on recognition; but savings can be so large that you ought to share some of it with employees.

Of course, your everyday customer service efforts are a key part of this equation to reduce customer defections. Poor service is responsible for 40% of customer defections, according to a study by Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc. Therefore, evaluating the results of your customer service strategy and plans should be an important exercise in conjunction with your other defection management efforts.

Desk.com customer Dwolla — the name’s a combination of the “dollar” and “web” — is on the forefront of online payment technology. While Dwolla is used by consumers, it also empowers businesses big and small by allowing them to take payments at a fraction of the transactional costs currently charged by most payment methods. It has 25 million users, and growing, with a support staff that hovers around six or seven people. Dwolla recently announced a new round of funding to help make their vision for a frictionless open network — available on any device connected to the internet — a reality.

Desk.com’s Rand Lutomski sat down with Jordan Lampe of Dwolla to talk about the lessons learned as a startup in the financial space and how Dwolla created an effective online customer-service storefront to help revolutionize what we think of commerce today.

This is the first of a series of conversations with Desk.com users who are shaping their industries and recognize that outstanding customer support is a strategic part of their success. What companies and industries do you think are paving the way? Leave a comment and let us know.

From the start in 1999, the founders of DealerFire.com knew they had two key strengths to set their company apart in the jam-packed automotive marketing industry: their deep understanding of web and marketing innovation and their desire to deliver great customer support. Today, DealerFire’s award-winning custom websites bring clients thousands of leads — but it’s the reputation for award-winning customer support that the company says is responsible for 70% of new business.

We asked the DealerFire team to share some of its secrets to achieving powerful results through a high-level of customer service. The key, they say, is to have streamlined systems in place. These help customer-support agents efficiently ensure customer requests are fulfilled and everyone in the company has an easy way to improve the customer’s experience through a Salesforce.com and Desk.com integration. We put together a detailed story of how DealerFire went from overwhelmed agents to having award-winning customer support programs. Read it to understand how DealerFire uses Desk.com for:

• Case management

• Deeper customer history information through Salesforce integration

• Company project and task management

Whether you’re a current Desk.com user or just looking for ways to help your business get better, DealerFire’s story is a great read to see how customer support and efficient systems can benefit you and your customer.

The DealerFire team visit to Desk.com HQ

Big thanks to Justin Aaron and Corey from DealerFire for stopping by our offices during their trip to San Francisco and sharing their story with us. Whether you’re a customer of Desk.com or a part of an organization that’s seen customer support make an impact in your business, we want to hear from you. Drop a comment here and let us know — or if you’re like the DealerFire team, tweet us and stop by Desk.com HQ to say hello.

Customer service defined this way (as an operation) inspires few to the heights of service greatness. It does lead to structured processes, procedures, scripts, and metrics that leaders often mistake for customer service.  As a result these procedures don’t produce unforgettable customer service.

To deliver unforgettable customer service, start with this simple effective definition:

Build procedures, processes, employee training, teamwork, online and self-service portals around this definition — delivering knowledge with care.

How far-reaching is customer service defined this way?

Does it apply to …

• All industries? For example, Finance, Retail, Healthcare, Legal, Pharmaceuticals, Utilities, Hospitality, Dining, Airlines, Education, Bridal, Home Repair … Yes.
• Help Desks and Technical Support?  Yes.
• Service to employees within an organization? Yes.
• Service to external customers of an organization? Yes.
• Business-to-business and consumer customer service? Yes.
• Online customer service? Yes.
• Self-service portals? Yes.
• Does it work for business, non-profit, academia, and government? Yes.

Why Does It Matter How Customer Service is Defined?

A definition held in the mind affects behavior.

• If your organization thinks of customer service as a department, you won’t see the cross teamwork needed to deliver great customer service.
• If your organization thinks of customer service as an operation, you won’t create strong customer relationships through empathy and care. Even if you develop them through the sales reps, you will see those relationships decline when service doesn’t include care.
• Many in the customer service profession define customer service is an attitude of caring. Yet those in the operational aspect often find that definition lacking. They say: “Where is the delivery?” You must deliver something!

This brings us to customer service defined as: Knowledge delivered with care to make life easy for the customer!

You can modify this customer service definition to reflect your business. For example,

• Knowledge and solutions delivered with care to make life easy for the customer.
• Knowledge and solutions delivered with care to make it easy for the customer to be productive

• Knowledge and solutions delivered with care to make it easy for the customer to be profitable.

The key components to include are delivery (of something) and the aspects of care and ease. They build mutual bonds of success for your organization and your customers!

Question: In your organization, is customer service defined to take you far and high? I am your resource and very interested to hear your perspective.

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Exporting from a Filter or Search Results

We’re super proud of Desk.com’s search functionality, and our customers love it too. We’ve made it even better by letting you export your search results – or export right from a filter! Now, once you perform a search or open a filter, you can use the Bulk Update Editor to export the cases and view them in Excel! Simply perform your search, select all the cases that you want exported, and click export on the bottom right. (Note: You’ll need to enable this first by logging into your Admin panel and going to Case Management → Agents → Export Cases to set permissions)

Updated Export Format

We’ve also made it easier for you to read reports from Business Insights. Our new export format makes your reports more Excel-friendly than ever before! The changes include:

• Metrics converted from rows to columns, making data easier to understand
• Columns now have meaningful names, so you know exactly what you’re looking at
• Date format is now standard readable format, so no need to perform any conversions

Now you can sort and pivot your data however you want!

Improvements to Business Insights

Finally, we’ve made some cool changes to our Business Insights that will make it even more valuable for our customers.

• Hourly Reporting Extended:

  • You can now view detail reports hourly for up to 14 days, instead of just 3

• Custom Segments:

  • You can now select up to 7 different agents, labels, or custom fields when running your reports

• Hide that All line!

  • You can now view all the segments you’re looking at without distraction from the “All” line. To do this, simply change what you want the “All” line to represent to “Nothing (hide it)” before you hit “Update”

Amazing Service is Not a Given

Think back to the last time you interacted with a brand. Did you have a great experience? If you didn’t, the organization probably didn’t do an effective job translating the vision of the company – to provide amazing service – with the tactics of actually providing that differentiated service experience to the customer.

Turning Strategy into tactics

At Desk.com, we’re interested in helping you to help your customers, so we made this presentation specifically with ideas in mind that you can use today. Here are a number of tips that you can use to WOW your customers and provide excellent service. Try them out, and let us know in the comments if you have great tips for delivering service that we should know about!

10 Great Tips – try them today.

1. Poor Customer Service Kills Repeat Business
2. Use Social Selling to Grow Your Business
3. Give the Customer a Head Start
4. Say Thank You, and Solve the Problem
5. Customers Want Really Fast Service
6. Customers Will Go to Another Company with Great Service if You Don’t Offer Great Service
7. Protecting your Ego Might Cause Churn
8. Deliver a Shareable WOW Experience
9. Share the Solution to the Problem Broadly
10. Partner with Front-Line Employees to Solve Problems

Nextdoor is a free, private social network for the neighborhood. Imagine an easy way to organize a neighborhood group, track down a lost pet or get a recommendation on a good babysitter or plumber. These are ways Nextdoor’s growing user base relies on the website every day. It’s growing so quickly that dealing with the influx of customer requests is a top priority.

The Philosophy of Customer Support a.ka. Neighborhood Operations

“Our support team is in a unique position to work directly with our members across the country,” says Gordon Strause, Nextdoor’s Director of Neighborhood Operations. For self-serve tools like Nextdoor, user support is often the first touch point between the company and its members. Ensuring that members have a useful and enjoyable experience is a core component of the organization, and the Neighborhood Operations team is an integral part of the company. “Supporting our members was part of the philosophy from the start,” said Strause “and ‘What can we do to make the member successful?’ is the mantra.”

Homegrown Challenges and the Desk.com Solutions

Before implementing Desk.com, the team at Nextdoor used a shared email account for support emails and an internal tool to create a very basic FAQ page. Strause says that almost immediately after implementing Desk, the support team deflected a lot of member questions and emails due to the searchable knowledge base that is full of tailored articles. “Desk’s core systems helped us better manage cases across our team,” he says. Support requests dropped by almost 50% after the team moved help articles to Desk.com.

Nextdoor also wanted to have a system in place that supports their neighborhoods Leads — usually the Founding Members of Nextdoor neighborhoods who are strong inviters and active community leaders — who typically have unique and more complicated support requests. For example, Leads set up their neighborhoods and might need expert attention right away, while a community member can find answers to frequently asked questions in the Help Center. Using custom fields in Desk.com, support specialists can record whether the case is from a community member or a Lead. That way, when they reach out again, inbound interaction rules correctly route cases and can even send them to a specific support specialist.

Agent Tools to Keep the Community Happy

“One of my favorite things to do is dig in and understand the history and solve [members’] problems,” said Nextdoor’s Theresa Burns. Burns is a veteran support specialist, having spent six years in customer support before joining the Nextdoor team. She says time is the biggest challenge for Nextdoor. “We’re growing so fast,” Burns says. “Many new members have questions and we want to get to them as quickly as possible.”

Her favorite Desk.com solution is the search feature — it, not only helps resolve questions more quickly, but also helps specialists understand the members and their neighborhoods. “If search doesn’t work well, it can really slow you down.” Before Desk.com was implemented, specialist had to manually search the shared email account to see if there were any previous interactions with the user. Now, with Desk.com, interaction history is accessible at the top of every email, so specialists can see right away if a member has previously contacted the support team — specialist no longer have to manually search for the background history. “It’s really easy to find a case,” Burns says. “There are so many specialized selections within the search feature. You can search by handles, for certain words, ‘any of these words’ or the case ID.”

Having the right information easily accessible for members and support specialists has also been key for self-support and specialist efficiency. “I try to provide user support in a timely manner and at the same time find ways to improve the process and the content,” Burns says. If something is unclear in a support center article, Burns finds ways to make it easier to understand. The goal is to give members the tools to find information quickly on their own, so they don’t have to contact us with a question. “That’s what I like about Desk.com,” she says. “If I find something that is confusing in a help article, I can easily go in and edit it to make it more clear.”

In this guide, you’ll learn how to address the challenges of a disengaged workforce by baking a long-term, customer-centric company culture into everything you do. From hiring and training to motivating your staff, discover industry-proven steps to build your customer service dream team.

Here’s a sneak peak of what you’ll find in this guide:

We hope this guide will help you start thinking about social customer support and what changes need to be made to refocus your attention on your customers.

Download the FREE guide: “Building a Customer Service Dream Team.”

Enter TicketLeap, a self-service online ticketing platform for event organizers to manage the ticketing process. Since launching in 2003, their goal has been to give event planners an easy-to-use, do-it-yourself ticketing system that also makes it a breeze for event attendees to get their tickets. “We want to make ticketing the best possible experience for buyers and patrons and fans to get into the event versus being looked at as the barrier of entry,” says Tim Raybould, president & COO of TicketLeap.

Keeping Customer Support DIY

Last year TicketLeap did $52 million gross ticket sales, which means they powered a lot of events. One way they’ve helped users stay DIY is with the TicketLeap Support Center, powered by Desk.com. The support center is updated on a regular basis and kept current with useful articles.

Before Ticketleap added the Support Center with Desk.com agents spent 80% of their day on the phone helping one customer at a time. “We selected Desk.com specifically for its ability to easily build a knowledge base,” says former TicketLeap CTO Keith Fitzgerald. Today agents spend 20% of their time on the phone with complicated cases and 80% on email leveraging articles from the knowledge base.

Tips for Creating a Top-Notch Support Center

So how did TicketLeap turn the support center into such a useful and powerful tool? “Our knowledge base is regularly updated every two to three weeks,” says Allison Berger, TicketLeap community manager. Along with tweeting and updating the TicketLeap social channels, Allison manages the “help” content. The articles she creates are immediately available for agents and customers searching the support center.

Product “sprints” or updates and fixes are a regular occurrence for web products like TicketLeap. Customers access it on iOS, Android and browsers, so it’s crucial to keep help articles current as the product evolves. “Knowledge base makes it very easy to keep our help articles updated,” says Allison. Her tips for keeping the knowledge base in shape:

• After each product update, check related articles to ensure content is still relevant.
• If a customer asks a question and a topic doesn’t exist yet, create it. “I click ‘new article’ and I start typing,” she says.
• Break content into sections. TicketLeap has a section for ticket buyers, sellers, as well as for iOS and the platform.
• Add images and use the html code — “Make things look pretty,” she advises.

“As a community manager, I honestly can’t imagine working for a company that doesn’t use Desk.com,” says Allison. “It really is a great way to organize all the questions that come in — it makes it easy to really help people.”

Check out the video below with TicketLeap to see how they use Desk.com and Salesforce together to grow their business and provide an even better experience for customers. Read an in-depth story about their use of Salesforce and Desk.com here.

With over 1,500 developers using our API, we’ve incorporated your feedback and updated our interface to make it more in-line with the most commonly asked-for requirements.

Now, you can:

• Create notes on a case
• Create, update, and list companies
• Create reports
• Access meta data for custom fields
• List users and filters belonging to a group
• Retrieve cases from specific filters
• Create outbound replies to emails
• Search knowledge base articles

The new API provides more endpoints, allowing you greater access to the case, customer, company, and knowledge base information in your Desk.com system.  You can now easily reply to cases, and obtain a complete view of customers and their cases with linked related resources.  Additional updates include basic authentication, more explicit error messaging, field level validation, and clear indication of rate limits with each response. Finally, we’ve built the API around the emerging HAL industry standards, making it easier to use than ever before! Checkour all of our developer resources at dev.desk.com!