If a customer has a bad experience with your business, does it immediately follow that they will leave you?
It’s received wisdom that a problem with your product, a delay in your delivery, an employee with a ‘challenging’ demeanor, and myriad other factors can easily make your customers forget everything you did to please them and leave you.
But did you know that customers can often be more loyal to your business after they have experienced a service failure, than if it had never happened in the first place?
Instead of accepting a customer is going to leave, it’s important to seek to convert as many of your failures into success as possible. And even if they do ultimately leave after all your efforts, you’ll still find out a great deal about how to stop future issues happening if you seek to find out as much as possible from the unhappy customer in question.
Teach your customer service team how to react to bad reviews and execute quickly
The world’s best businesses not only know that everyone makes a mistake sometimes, they actively plan for it. Luxury hotels, top end goods brands, huge airline carriers – they usually do a fantastic job, but on the rare occasion something does go wrong, the differentiating factor is that they do something about it immediately, often without being asked or without the customer necessarily even having to complain.
Companies with the best customer service understand the paradox: customers are often more loyal after a service failure (so long as the recovery has been swift and good) than customers who have not experienced a service failure at all. They therefore, build processes into their customer retention strategy to enable them to keep customers buying, even after things went awry.
Here are some tactics that can help you with your customer retention strategy even after a bad experience:
Find out exactly what happened
Customers who want to tell you how they feel about your business should be actively encouraged. If you show an interest in their complaint, ask for specific detail, talk it through with them, you’re already halfway to turning them around.
It’s time to start thinking about what kind of powerful corrective actions you could take if you could understand how every one of your customers felt.
What a customer deems to be a “bad experience” can vary hugely. Some customers are extremely sensitive to certain issues and others are not. Thus, a highly prescriptive approach to complaints handling can often lead your business to approach feedback in entirely the wrong way.
Until you know not just exactly went wrong between your business and the customer, but why they feel the way they do about it is impossible to create a lasting fix. Once you’ve got to the bottom of the situation, make sure that knowledge is shared internally within your team (but in a spirit of sharing and improving, rather than blame.)
Admit what went wrong One of the biggest errors in customer relationship management is not admitting the mistake. Nothing annoys customers more than them having an issue and the company they are buying from staunchly refusing to even entertain a discussion about it.
When an error is brought to a company’s attention, it needs to be admitted and discussed. This will give the customer a message that you have taken control of the whole scenario, and are empowered to fix it.
Take immediate action
Don’t wait, don’t prevaricate, don’t argue. Empower as many people as possible within your business to do the same.
Analyze your customer processes – do refunds take an age to process? Is your returns or refunds process itself really arduous? The longer a difficult situation with a customer drags on, the more likely you are to lose them for good. Seek to take the swiftest possible action to rectify things for your customers and they will appreciate your focus and your efficiency.
Apologize
Simple but overlooked. You need to take responsibility and say sorry. Often this is all customers want to hear and it can be extremely disarming. In combination with a plan to solve their issues, an apology can be one of the most powerful tools in your customer retention armory.
Sense problems as early as possible
The biggest issue with the tips above is that so many customers don’t bother complaining. Research shows that 96% of customers who have had an issue walk away without ever saying a word to the company.
Reaching out to customers to find out how you did (before any complaints or otherwise) can save you plenty of headaches in the future. Encouraging your staff to ask questions, embedding a short survey or feedback mechanism into your communications – all these things will help you gather more feedback.
A final hurdle is, it’s important you can identify who said what. Generic feedback is broadly useful in identifying trends and fixing internal issues. But if you don’t know who the customer is, can’t go back to that customer and tell them what you’re doing to solve their problem.
Only after having accurate knowledge of what kind of feelings the bad experience has invoked in the minds and hearts of customers, you can take corrective measures and plan out a scheme that can build customer loyalty or regain the trust you lost.
Mastering customer retention, even after a bad experience is key to thrive in any business. Not only because it shows that you care about the people you do business with, but because it has a multiplying effect. The more loyal your clients are, the easier it will become to get new ones through word of mouth. Having an established customer base will not only benefit you the short run but in the long run as well. Start your retention strategy today, make you customers happy and keep building a fantastic business.
Remember, customers who are treated well during a hiccup won’t abandon you. Treat customers well throughout your service recovery process and they may well turn into some of your best advocates.
Lindsay Willot
Customer Thermometer monitors your customers’ feedback in real time.If you know what they’re thinking, you have a fighting chance of fixing it.
Find out more at Customerthermometer.com
Latest posts by Lindsay Willot (see all)
- How to Keep Customers in the Loop After a Bad Experience - August 17, 2016