What your customers don’t tell you and how to find out

It’s true. Your customers don’t care about your product. They don’t care about your competitor’s products either. Don’t worry, your customers don’t care about any products. Thankfully, customers do care about something, which is why they buy your product.

Their perceptions will make or break your ability to move forward with your products. You can’t afford to disappoint customers or even offer them a good-enough experience. You have to “wow” them every time, which means giving them the first fruits of your time, energy, creativity and focus.

Generally, customers rarely share their good experiences but they are quick to complain and bad mouth brands due to influence among peers.

A bad experience can befall customers at any time and it’s important that you are in the know, when it comes to unsatisfying experiences that they encounter from your business.

More so than often, the same customers will not bother to tell you. due to various reason. Mostly due from lack of communication channels to perhaps rude customer support person.

This tendency can certainly bring a negative impact to your business because

• You cannot find out clearly which part of your product or service needs to be improved
• Your customers might stop buying your products without any reason.

Here are five reasons that hinder your customers from sharing their bad experience — and ways you can solve them.

• No easy communication channels
• Public outlets online to vent out on the Internet
• Complicated complaint processing mechanism
• The feeling complaining will not solve anything
• Ignorance on service quality after multiple complaints

Let’s jump right in. Most companies today offer a dedicated hotline for customers to customer support department. They tend to find that tedious and frustrating, they are looking for an easier way to address their issues using lighter platforms like social media. Use social media to find out what customers have to say before you lose them to bad chatter.

That would be your first step to understand what’s frustrating your customer. Sometimes however, customers are looking for a way to share their feelings and look for like-minded people to rant in a less harmful way. Online solutions such as Yelp to TripAdvisor can help you understand what it is exactly that you are missing out on. These sites are leading because customers prefer to vent out about their bad experience there, as they can rate your service and share about it with other users.

Zappos uses call center technology to track average call time per agent. But the goal isn’t to reduce this average… “It’s more important that we make an emotional connection with the customer, rather than just quickly getting them off the phone. — Tony Hsieh

This is one, we have a very soft spot for. Hotline based support mechanism needs to be streamlined, so that it is in line with its main mission — to help any customers who are facing an issue. Some customers feel there is nothing to gain from complaining. Keep in mind that this does not mean your service is always flawless at all times. This assumption is the reason why often restaurants and rapid growing startups fail in the long run. Startups who overlook this often fall into expanding their roadmap with consequences down the road. To encourage customer’s feedback, you can take advantage of pop-up on the web page or ask them to fill comment cards at your retail store.

“The purpose of the business is to [Listen] to customers not ignore them.” Shiv Singh, SalesForce

…And finally — ignorance on service quality after multiple complaints. Even though this rarely happens, some business might ignore to improve the quality of their service even after receiving complaints from multiple customers. This case very likely leads to a negative public reputation that can bring your business down: customers are taking your bad service for granted, they don’t even bother to complain anymore, let alone do business with you. That’s why it’s crucial for a business to never disregard even the smallest complaint it receives and always try to up the service.

These are 5 lessons you can help you to become a customer centric business; keep your customers at the center of your business decision making. What that means in practice is something else. Among the many reasons business fail to become customer-centric is that their customer understanding does reflect what drives customer behavior. These simple tasks allow you to be able to have a feedback system in place that will prevent you from missing out on how your customer feels.

Get in touch with our representative for a complementary UX analysis at start@punch.cool