Claimstrainer Blog

Encouraging Your Customers To Complain will Improve Your Customer Experience results

Customers Complaints Will Force You To Improve Your Product/Business. Inviting complaints from customers is one of the very best ways to improve customer retention. 

Ask  your customers to tell you about what makes them unhappy about your product and/or service. Why? So that you can learn and get better.

1. You aren’t getting the whole story about your business.

The vast majority of unhappy customers (research shows around 96%) don’t bother to complain, they simply walk away. So you’re only hearing from 4% of your unhappy customers. Imagine what the other 96% would tell you. Think about what that 96% are saying to their peers about your company. Imagine what you could start, stop or keep doing as a result of asking for their feedback and taking appropriate action as a result.


2. Bad news about your business travels faster than good A study by the University of Nottingham has shown that


“80% will vent their anger to at least ten people
 and 20% sound off to at least 20 others !”

The internet has made this phenomenon even more dangerous. Every customer now has the equivalent of a front-page article in the New York Times by creating an amusing post or video article. So it’s even more essential to fix customer problems before they hit social media. Ask for the problems as soon as you can and fix them quickly.

3. Fixing problems turns angry customers into loyal advocates

Jake Poore, who looked after “service recovery” for Disney says, “everyone makes mistakes, that’s human.

But how do you solicit those mistakes and rectify them so that the story is now possibly better than if there were no mistake at all?”

He makes the point that customers who go home mad tell their story, whereas those who go home happy tell your story. Often a bad experience that was turned around makes for a happier customer and a better story than a customer who had a good experience in the first place.

4. Your staff will be more focused on making the customer happy.

If customer service is important to you, and you demonstrate it at every opportunity by asking customers how you can improve, your staff will become acutely aware of how their actions impact customer satisfaction. It becomes part of the fabric of the way you do business.

At Zappos for example, all new staff regardless of role, spend time in the customer service department taking customer calls.

5. Soliciting customers’ complaints and fixing them builds a remarkable business.

Many companies struggle to keep the customer at the heart of their business. Over time, processes, new staff and market changes can obscure the original vision of the business and make it difficult to be truly customer-centric. The best customer-serving businesses never lose sight of what their customer really wants.

By constantly and proactively listening you can introduce little touches that make customers really happy, without breaking the bank. These touches make doing business with you more interesting… making you more talked-about in the process.

Ultimately, the more feedback you solicit, the more you can tailor your service to your best customers, fix problems when they arise and keep them for life.

 Better and more useful feedback

Encouraging customers to complain is one way that firms can encourage their customers to talk to them more freely and to provide better feedback such that it helps them serve them better. Ian Siegel from ZipRecruiter in an interviewputs it very well when he says that “customers are great at telling you what you should do next ….by telling you what they are frustrated with”. ZipRecruiter has really embraced this idea and has used it to help them develop their goal of ‘reducing their customer service calls to zero’. The idea being that if they build a business that is so good and has products that are so easy to use such that customers didn’t need to call them then they would have built the perfect product and perfect business.

What about customer reviews

Customer Reviews help you learn from your mistakes. There are a number of ways in which bad reviews can actually help your business. Notable among them is that bad reviews provide insight into what's not working with your product or service so that you can fix problems. Acknowledging this in the reviews section, then highlighting that a change was made in response to customer feedback, shows that you care about what customers think and are always trying to create a better experience for them.

Customer Reviews give you a public opportunity to get it right the second time. Okay, maybe you really screwed up: A customers' dinner was a disaster. You ran out of roses right before Valentine's Day. Or a big storm trashed your pristine beach before a couple's destination wedding. Responding quickly, in a caring and constructive way, shows that even on your worst day, your customer service is the best. Remember: Most consumers will do business with a company again after a negative experience if their customer service issue is resolved favorably.

Let them complain. Do something good afterwards and you will build loyal followers