Handling Customer Dissatisfaction is a Source of ROI

On February 29, a famous French TV channel featured a report on customer relationships and managing customer dissatisfaction in particular. Indeed, handling complaints has become a strategic matter for companies today. According to a Capgemini study, happy customers share their positive experiences with others on average three times, while unhappy customers feel more involved and talk about their experiences ten times.

Customer relationships is a field that is constantly changing. Consumer behaviour evolves and so do consumers’ interactions with brands. Whether or not they are satisfied depends on their wants, expectations, and experiences. Companies understand this fact and are constantly trying to optimise the strategic issue that is customer relationships. Behind these improvement initiatives, the way customer dissatisfaction is handled is extremely important. Why? Not knowing how to react to an unhappy customer represents a substantial loss in revenue.

DISSATISFACTION COSTS BRANDS SIX BILLION EUROS

This statistic alone shows how important it is to process negative customer feedback. By simply taking care of unhappy customers, companies can earn nearly six billion euros per year.

In a highly segmented global market occupied by an increasing number of ever more innovative companies, customers seem to have been left behind. The drive to create perfect products and services is crucial, but it's through the customer’s experience that companies can stand out from the competition, increase satisfaction, and build loyalty.

You very well might have designed your market’s best-looking and most user-friendly product that also meets your users' every need, but if the customer experience is disappointing, you won't get return business six times out of ten. Handling complaints from your customers requires a specialised and highly empathetic strategy.

The goal is to handle negative customer feedback as well and as quickly as possible. By adopting a system for managing dissatisfaction, you can adjust the tone you use when speaking with your customer depending on their level of unhappiness. Taking the customer’s problem into consideration is critical and even comes before offering a solution for the problem.

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Ninety-six percent of unhappy customers don't inform the company directly. However, dissatisfied customers will discuss their experience ten times with the people around them. A portion of your potential customers will be influenced by this negative word of mouth communication even though you are unaware of the original cause.

Nowadays, the Internet and Web 2.0 give a lot of power to Internet users. Companies’ reputations are no longer controlled by their communication directors; instead, the balance of power has shifted to customer opinions.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Warren Buffet

The challenge for companies when developing a dissatisfaction processing system is to remove all barriers in the way of customer expression. The main reasons are customers’ lack of faith in the brand and a lack of time. Companies must be able to refocus their customer relationship policy and value input from their local stores. When customers see their comments are sent to the right person and not just the company’s main customer relationship department, they are more apt to share their feedback.

There are dedicated solutions designed to collect and handle customer feedback, such as the one offered by Critizr, which allows companies to effectively address customer dissatisfaction. The return on investment offered by this approach is considerable as it helps brands win back customers, build loyalty, deliver an effective sales strategy, and significantly increase turnover.