What's good customer service worth to you?

It’s very common to hear a colleague, friend or family member raise their voice when speaking to customer service representatives. Sometimes they’ll even curse at them. I’ll just complain sometimes so I get something free.

Customer service, good or bad, plays an important role in determining where people choose to shop and spend. That’s a given, even though it still appears as a research finding in nearly all customer service surveys.

What is surprising, somewhat, is that nearly 85 percent of consumers say they would gladly pay more for good or superior customer service. This comes from Right Now ‘s 5th Annual Customer Experience Report released last week.

How much more? Fifty five percent of consumers surveyed would pay 10% or more; 27 percent would pay 15% or more and 10 percent would pay 25% or more.

Equally as noteworthy, is that of the 2,217 US adults surveyed, 82 percent of respondents said they stopped doing business with a company because of a bad experience - 75 percent said they never returned. Is there a social network stat in the mix? Well, 79 percent of consumers who have had a negative customer service experience said that they've told other people about it. Furthermore, 66 percent admit they mentioned it because they wanted to discourage other people from doing business with that company.

Some things identified in the report appear to be be fixable if companies want to act on the information. Rude staff was the leading cause of not doing business with a company according to 73 percent of those surveyed; 55 percent say it's because issues weren’t resolved quickly and 51 percent relayed it's due to 'unknowledgeable' staff.