Customer Complaints are a gold mine
You can’t afford to ignore customer feedback
Social Media is playing a pivotal role in today’s information era, where customer feedback has become a new ritual after every business transaction. Majority of business establishments have put together a process for collecting customer feedback. Additionally, there are plethora of online platforms available for posting customer reviews and feedback.
The purpose of receiving or providing feedback is to collect information regarding the customer’s overall experience about the product, service, process or any other business interaction. It is aimed at improving customer satisfaction, enhance customer loyalty, to address or reduce customer’s disagreements and most importantly, to enable business growth.
Despite major consequences on business outcome, customer feedback is often ignored even today by almost all organizations, either consciously or unconsciously.
If you don’t listen to your customer’s complaint, someone else will
A complaint is essentially a statement of dissatisfaction and can be easily captured in the form of feedback. Customers may have a complaint about something an organization has done or failed to do. Customer complaints may become blessing in disguise, if addressed properly. They have a potential to create a havoc for the organization, if ignored. Clever business representatives often take advantage by revealing the customer complaints of their competitors and portray their own products or services as better alternatives in front of their potential customers.
Customers often don’t complain
If customers are not complaining that does not mean all is well. A survey shows that out of 100 dissatisfied customers “97% don’t complain”, they just shift to the competitor. There are multiple reasons behind this behavior of customers. They think that their complaints are not welcome, or no one will listen to them or they will be treated with suspicion. They tried complaining in the past, but nothing happened, or they don’t know whom to complain. Process of complaining is time consuming and troublesome than moving on to next available alternative.
Should customer complaint be handled promptly?
If an organization is prompt in resolving customer complaints by rectifying problems with their product, services or any other processes, then they can even turn their dissatisfied customers into loyal ones. Prompt response give confidence to the customers that their complaints are being addressed. It helps to prevent future customer dissatisfaction, results in improved product quality and service delivery. Improvement in overall customer satisfaction leads to customer retention and attracts new customers for business growth. Customers may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel.
That’s the reason why customer complaints in the form of feedback are a precious gift. A prompt action on customer complaints, which are no less than a gold mine, provides potential growth opportunities for every organization.
