The No. 1 Reason Customers Come Back

If you walked up to people on the street and asked, “What is the number one reason you go back to a business?,” you may find the top answers include customer service and customer experience. Sure, the quality of a product is important, but if the item doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, the customer won’t come back to buy it again. No amount of good customer service will convince customers to keep spending their hard-earned money on something that doesn’t work. Conversely, if you have an amazing product but you treat customers badly, they will seek out a different place to do business, one that treats them with the respect and dignity they deserve. Certain customers may even be willing to sacrifice some product quality, as long as they are treated the right way.

Our 2022 Achieving Customer Amazement research was just released, and we surveyed over 1,000 customers to find out exactly what drove them to say, “I’ll be back.” Of course, it was the customer experience—specifically, the people who provided that experience—which falls under the category of customer service. By the way, customer service is not a department that handles complaints. It is how all employees treat their customers, regardless of why they are interacting with the company. It could be part of the sales process, answering a question about an invoice or resolving an actual complaint. It’s any and every interaction customers have with the company.

So, with that in mind, it turns out that common sense should tell you what customers want. We asked, “What customer service experiences were most likely to cause you to come back?” The top two answers were employees who were helpful and friendly.

Don’t stop reading because you think this is too simple or basic. On the contrary, this is exactly what customers complain about when they don’t get that experience, and everyone needs to be reminded about it. There’s an art to being helpful and friendly. It’s the foundation of customer service.

Something else to consider is that the opposites of kindness and helpfulness are rudeness and apathy, which according to our customer service research, are the top reasons customers are likely to switch companies or leave a brand.

Bear in mind that being helpful and friendly is not a skill. Neither are rudeness and apathy. These words are attitudes or traits. Everyone knows what being nice is. Your parents taught you to be nice. They taught you to be polite and say please and thank you. This isn’t a corporate training topic. You don’t go to a week-long course on how to be nice. You either are, or you’re not. Chances are, a person wouldn’t be hired to do any type of customer-facing job if they showed up to the interview and demonstrated rude behavior. It’s expected that you would at least be nice. And if you are, you still to practice, but not like an athlete practices for a sport. In this case, practice does not make perfect. Instead, practice forms a habit.

One other thought about being helpful and friendly. When people describe the experience they have with your company, you want them to include an extra word, and that word is always. Employees being helpful and friendly should not be notable because it is out of the ordinary. It must be all the time. Customers may not know it, but they crave consistency, or in other words, a predictable experience. Consistency creates confidence that when they interact with any employee, the experience will always meet their basic needs. You want your customers to say, “They are always so friendly,” and “They are always so helpful.” When they do, you know you are meeting those needs and that they will also say, “I’ll be back!”