{"id":884,"date":"2011-10-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-26T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/improve-customer-loyalty-embracing-customer-complaints\/"},"modified":"2019-11-30T04:35:26","modified_gmt":"2019-11-30T09:35:26","slug":"improve-customer-loyalty-embracing-customer-complaints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/improve-customer-loyalty-embracing-customer-complaints\/","title":{"rendered":"Improve Customer Loyalty by Embracing Customer Complaints"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In the Journal of Service Research<\/em>, one-third of 244 consumers said they’d experienced or witnessed insensitive, disrespectful or rude employee behavior an average of once per month. A recent story from the CBS News affiliate in Atlanta<\/a> highlighted this finding and concluded that customers are more likely to walk away without saying anything rather than seek out a manager to complain.<\/p>\n

A 2010 research study<\/a> we conducted amongst 1015 respondents had similar findings. For both the Journal of Service Research<\/em> and our study, the overwhelming reason for complaints is quality of service \u2013 regardless of industry. In our study we looked at treatment of staff separately from the quality of service and it came way down in the ranking for formal complaints, thus confirming the findings in the article that people don\u2019t complain formally about rude staff.<\/p>\n

However, when we looked at the prompting event for complaints posted via social media, treatment by staff ranked third. Therefore it is much more dangerous because while managers don\u2019t necessarily hear about the problem, people are far more likely to complain about it via social media.<\/p>\n

The reason for this is that only 25 percent of people say that it is easy to speak to a manager<\/a>. As problematic staff behavior goes undetected, a vicious cycle takes shape. Rude behavior pushes customers out the door and into the digital \u201cstreets\u201d to spread the word about a company\u2019s poor service.<\/p>\n

Another factor to consider is that employees often offer inconsistent customer service, making it difficult for managers to see the whole picture. 62 percent of respondents, for example, said that the quality of customer experience with a particular company \u201cdepends on who you speak to,\u201d suggesting overall customer experience varies by employee.<\/p>\n

Here are some things you could do to deal with bad customer service and rude staff behavior:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Hire the attitude and train the skill.<\/strong>
    \nOne of our contacts, an automotive company, recruited a person for their reception desk that came from a two Michelin star restaurant rather than picking a candidate with industry-relevant experience. The results were outstanding. The employee\u2019s attitude broke the mold in a male-dominated industry characterized by a strong sales focus, high employee turnover and little consideration of customer emotions.<\/li>\n
  2. Make it easy for customers to reach and talk to managers.<\/strong>
    \nThe Commonwealth Bank of Australia invested A$1m to increase the number of complaints they receive. That\u2019s right: to increase them! The reason is that if you don\u2019t, you would still have the same number of dissatisfied customers, but you would not hear about many of them. Thus they are at risk of attrition and you many never hear about the problem. On the other hand, if you hear about it and handle the complaints well, you can turn these customers from detractors to promoters (i.e., the service failure paradox) and you can charge the cost of handling the complaint back to the department that caused it. That way they will act to fix the root causes for the complaints.<\/li>\n
  3. Recognize and reward the right behavior.<\/strong>
    \nManagers must show their commitment to customer experience to staff and spend more time interacting with customers and front-line staff.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Employees know when their coworkers are rude. If the right behavior is recognized, rewarded and promoted, employees will follow the right path and customer loyalty<\/a> will improve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    \n
    <\/div>\n<\/td>\n
    		Zhecho<\/span>\u00a0Dobrev<\/strong>\u00a0is a consultant and project manager for\u00a0Beyond Philosophy<\/a>. He has worked with a wide array of large corporate companies.\u00a0Zhecho\u2019s<\/span>\u00a0expertise includes customer\u00a0behaviour<\/span>\u00a0analytics,\u00a0customer loyalty<\/a>, complaints management and journey mapping. He holds an MBA and Master\u2019s degree in International Relations.
    \n
    \nZhecho<\/span> Dobrev on Twitter\u00a0    @Zhecho_BeyondP<\/a>
    \n<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In the Journal of Service Research<\/em>, one-third of 244 consumers said they'd experienced or witnessed insensitive, disrespectful or rude employee behavior an average of once per month. A recent story from the CBS News affiliate in Atlanta<\/a> highlighted this finding and concluded that customers are more likely to walk away without saying anything rather than seek out a manager to complain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-customer-service"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}