The Surprising Customer Loyalty Killer
This seeming paradox is stemming from companies becoming so obsessed with Big Data and Big Process that they completely lose sight of the “Small Data” – the intimate, one-on-one connections we make with our customers.
Consider these two common loyalty-killing scenarios:
#1 John orders a pizza
that is delivered an hour late, cold and with the wrong ingredients. It’s the third time it has happened, with nothing as much as an apology.
Then he gets the email with the link to an Net Promoter Score or Customer satisfaction survey, and figures this is a great way to let the company know how poor his customer experience has been. He checks the box with the question, “Would you like to be contacted by someone about your experience,” and hits the ‘submit’ button.
Three weeks go by with no response. In John’s mind, it is now official: The company really just doesn’t care.
#2 Mary fills out a ‘contact us’ form on the website of a national office supply chain to tell them of how horrible their customer service is in one of their stores. Nothing. No hint of a response. Her comment had clearly fallen into a giant black hole.
Frustrated, Mary turns to Twitter. Three hours later, she gets a response to her tweet. Cautiously optimistic, she agrees to discontinue the public Twitter conversation, and continue the conversation by email. Two months pass, and there is still no indication that her comments have spawned any action. “What was the point of my complaining?” Mary wonders.
The result? Horrible customer experiences
John and Mary have two things in common.
1. Both have vowed to never do business with those companies again.
2. Both were pushed over the edge by the very customer experience feedback mechanisms that are supposed to be improving the experience.
The failures cross all three pillars of Customer Trust
These failures cross all three pillars of Customer Trust. They send the message that you really don’t care.; that you, as an organization aren’t competent and don’t have integrity. It’s the trifecta of loyalty-killers.
Most companies these days are firmly entrenched on the customer feedback / NPS / social bandwagon–but few have thought through the level of support required to make them effective – and the amount of damage that can be done to their brand when they get it wrong.
When your customers reach out to you – only to be ignored or treated, once again, like a line item in a process – their perception of how little you care is only reinforced. And that is an instant customer loyalty killer.
Here are two customer experience rules to live by:
1. If you’re going to give customers a mechanism for connecting with you – make sure you have the people with the resources, skills and empowerment to connect back and create WOW moments. (BTW: if you’re not going to give your customers a mechanism for connecting with you, you have a far larger problem…)
2. Big Data is meaningless without the Little Data. Stop staring at graphs and charts and numbers and get out there and talk with people. You can learn more in a single day doing that, than in a month of parsing data.
