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March 5, 2011Is simplicity at the heart of your customer experience?
March 13, 2011
I’ve just seen some really interesting results in an article in the March Edition of The Customer Experience Journal from Bruce Temkin across at the Temkin Group, a US a customer experience research and consulting firm.
The article is a digest of stuff that is going on with the Temkin Group, notable stuff in the world of customer experience and previews new research that they are producing.
Their most recent piece of research is called: How Consumers Give Feedback (the full report will cost you $195). Through their research they were able to survey 6,000 US consumers about how they most frequently gave feedback about Very Good and Very Bad experiences. Analysing their response, they found that when customers have a Very Good or a Very Bad experience with a business they found that they most frequently tell their friends about that experience via email, phone or in-person.
I’m not sure that is a real surprise.
There is a caveat here that this data is for US consumers but I do believe that there are some broad parallels that can be drawn for many ‘western’ businesses. Check out the summary results in the graphic below:
However, what I do think is interesting is some of the other results where they show
- Only small percentages of people placed reviews or comments on social media sites, whether the experience was good or bad;
- People are more likely to talk if it is a Very Bad experience than if it is a Very Good experience;
- 37% of all respondents said that even after a Very Good experience they did not tell anyone about it; and
- 25% of respondents didn’t tell anyone about a Very Bad experience.
The last two are the ones that trouble me.
- Why do 37% of all respondents that have had a Very Good experience not talk about it?
- Is it because that’s just the way they are ‘built’ and it’s not in their nature to share or is it that we as business have not given the right tools to share their experiences? and
- How many of the 25% of respondents that have had a Very Bad experience and do not tell anyone never go back or do business with that company again?
- I’ve talked about this before in Are You Not Getting Many Customer Complaints But Are Still Losing Customers? and, I think the solution has to be to go and look for those ‘unspoken’ complaints.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks to Katie Tegtmeyer for the image.
22 Comments
Hi Adrian
What I also find interesting is the amount of people who share via social media vs face to face. I also find the facebook / twitter split quite interesting as i would have thought twitter would have been higher.
I do think it is in our nature to spread the bad news rather than the good news, whether it is gossip, what bad things people have done or how someone has hurt us.
I think part of the reason is that we have to “show up” when we recommend something positive. We are putting our own personal reputations on the line. We dont want to be wrong or accused of recommending something that is bad. Of course when something is bad and we say it is there is nothing to lose and our reputations and our relationship stay in tact.
I think it was in one of Malcolm Gladwells books where they did the research that bad / negative behaviour was primed by negative word association. The context of our environment also has a huge impact on good / bad recommendations. This is also a law of physics – where like attracts like. So if a group is always slating something, then it is more natural to slate rather than praise.
Thanks for sharing these insights
Cheers
Michael
Hi Michael,
Thanks for those thoughts. I guess you may be right that it is innate within our own makeup to help avoid risk and fear and danger. We can see that in how we solve our social needs. I wonder how then we can make sharing of good news and good things less risky in the minds of customers?
Adrian
The answer for me is the customer journey.
If we accept that we would rather avoid pain than seek pleasure first we, then must find as many pains as possible and remove them from the environment.
An example would Amazon’s 1 Click system that takes all the pain and makes it so pleasurable and easy to use.
Sound easy in a comment but its hard work π
Cheers
Michael
Hi Michael,
I think you are onto something there. It’s a bit like building up trust credits by making everything so easy that we get so comfortable with the business that we are happy to recommend them. Amazon do a great job of making something so complex feel so easy.
Adrian
Hi Adrian.
I must say these were very positive numbers.
All the marketing courses I have taken have always said, “a happy customer tells 3 friends about it whilst a displeased customer tells 10”.
This shows the gap is probably not so large π
It does prove though that we have to make a lot more people pleased than we displease if the word of mouth is to just cancel each other out.
Hi Daniel,
That’s an interesting take on the numbers. Do you know of the marketing source for the βa happy customer tells 3 friends about it whilst a displeased customer tells 10β³ data as I’d be really interested to see if those numbers are changing now.
Adrian
Hi Adrian,
I learned that statistic when reading at Berghs School of Communication, but I think it might be in Kotlers Principals of Marketing as well, but don’t take my word for it.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for that. I’ll look it up.
Adrian
Hmmm… Interesting. I would have thought more people were sharing on social media these days.
I seem to also recall that statistic Daniel was mentioning with the 10 to 3 ratio, but like him, I don’t know where I heard that stat.
Have you found any good ways to coax those customer reactions out from hiding? I’ve done follow-up emails, phone calls, surveys, but wanted to see what other people’s best practices are.
Hi Greg,
I thought the same as you. With all of the attention that it gets you would think that it would be a channel that was more widely used. However, I saw some data from here in the UK that said that 7% of Twitter users accounted for 79% of all Twitter activity. So, just because people are on there does not necessarily mean that they are using it and so will more than likely default to means that they are comfortable with.
In terms of uncovering complaints, I’ve seen many things work including all of the things that you list out. However, it takes honesty, openness, time and intent to make it work. You’ve just given me another idea for another post so check back later and let me know how I did π
Thanks for dropping buy and sharing your thoughts,
Adrian
All right, looking forward to your post.