How much of the 96% are you losing?

A recent survey discovered that up to 96% of people who are unhappy with your organisation will not bother to tell you about it.

This is a very worrying statistic and should make anybody in customer service sit up and take note.

In basic terms this means that if 100 people were unhappy with you only 4 of them would bother to tell you about it.  Complaints should be encouraged at all times as they help to make you better but this survey shows that the overwhelming majority will not actually give you this vital and invaluable feedback which will help you improve your service.

The old saying goes that a complaint is an opportunity to put things right so if these statistics are accurate you will only be getting 4 opportunities to put things right for every 100 people who are not happy with you.

The main kicker here comes from the fact that although 96 out of 100 people will not tell you when something goes wrong some of those 96 will tell a lot of other people using the internet and services such as Facebook or Twitter to spread the bad word.

So what does happen to the 96 who tell you nothing or give you no opportunity to put things right?  Well quite simply they go elsewhere and you may never get them back.  This means that 96 people out of 100 will probably tell your competitors what you did wrong and will give them the vital information they need to a) improve their services and b) give them ammunition against you.

This gives your competitors an easy insight into your business and what you are doing wrong and allows them to act on the information and not you.

What can you do to up the numbers?  There is really not much that you can do unfortunately, if someone does not want to give you the information they do not have to however there are a few of things you can do to try and arrest this situation.

1.  Give them the opportunity and listen

This may seem incredibly simple however it always surprises me the amount of companies who make it very difficult in some way or another to make a complaint.  If you make it difficult to engage with you at this stage you will almost certainly never get the customer back on side and they will be gone forever.

If this is not arrested right away then at some point quite simply you will go out of business.

2.  Follow up on cancellations

If someone has stopped buying from you ask them why.  This is a trick that is missed so often it is almost funny.

When someone has been using your products or services for a while and they cease to then ask them what the reason is.  Is it simply that they have found a better deal?  Great offer them an even better deal.  Is it because they chose to try something different?  Great, then offer them a deal to come back to you in the future.

If however it is because you did something wrong then ask them to let you have it with both barrels.  Do this and the information you will receive, whilst painful, will ultimately be invaluable.

3.  Monitor what people are saying about you

I mentioned above that using the internet customers can generally say what they want about you.  The great thing is you can monitor this.  This is something you could never do in the past and gives you a huge opportunity.

There are a number of very simple ways to do this but probably the best tool is using Google Alerts.  This is a free service that lets you monitor the use of certain words or phrases on the internet.  Setting up a Google alert for every time one of your products is mentioned or your company / staff are referenced is a brilliant way to tune into the grapevine and find out what people are saying about you.

In the past if someone stopped dealing with you due to a bad experience they would use word of mouth to tell at least 10 people or more.  The thing here was you could not be sat at the dinner table listening to someone bad mouth you unless you started physically stalking your customers (not really advisable!!).

Nowadays if someone has a bad experience they can, and may, tell thousands of people using the internet, but the great news for you is that you can monitor this  – perfectly legitamely, very easily and best of all for free.

You can then act on this information.  This is a revolution in customer service and whilst I would not encourage you to become paranoid and read everything I would advise that you seriously consider setting this up.  It takes about five minutes and your competitors may already be doing it both for themselves but more worryingly they may have an alert set up to pounce every time someone shows they are disillusioned with your service.

A simple search for Google Alerts will show you everything you need to get started with this invaluable tool.

GA Training provide courses on handling complaints as part of their broad range of customer service courses.