How to Improve Your Business By Letting Customers Yell at You

It seems counter intuitive, but research backs it up!

Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic on Unsplash

Happy Monday, y'all! I hope you had a wonderful weekend. While you are thinking about it, please click the Like button for me, as it will increase visibility of this issue of Backstage Pass. Thank you!

So let's talk about a completely counter intuitive way to increase customer loyalty and improve brand Perception: Let your customer complain to you.

I know, it sounds crazy. But here's how it could work.

Let’s say for every product you buy, there are one of three outcomes as far as your satisfaction with the purchase:

1 – You’re indifferent. The product does what you expected it to do, no more or no less.

2 – You’re upset. The product doesn’t meet your expectations.

3 – You’re excited. The product exceeds your expectations.

If you are indifferent toward your purchase, the odds are that you aren’t likely to praise or criticize the purchase to other customers. Likely, it was an inexpensive purchase, and you really didn’t have high expectations for it to begin with. For instance, if your purchase cost a dollar and was a complete disappointment, well you are only out a dollar, so you are less likely to be as upset with the quality of the product.

If you are upset or excited with your purchase, then that means you want to talk about it.  You want to share your experience with others. And when you are excited about your purchase, you tell other customers! This leads to happy customers selling your products to other customers. Which is exactly what you want.

However, when most customers are upset with a purchase, they will also tell other customers. Interestingly, Guy Winch has found that 95% of the time when a customer is upset with a purchase, they will tell other customers, and won’t tell the company that made the product! According to Winch:

“Research has found that 95% of consumers who have a problem with a product don’t complain to the company, but they will tell their tale to eight to 16 people,” he says. “It’s unproductive because we’re not complaining to the people who can resolve our issue.”

Venting also floods the bloodstream with cortisol, the stress hormone. “We tell ourselves that we need to get it off our chest, but each time we do, we get upset all over again,” he adds. “We end up 10 to 12 times more aggravated.”

Isn’t that fascinating, in a depressing sort of way? But it makes complete sense that retelling a negative experience with a product to other customers would make us more upset with the purchase. And the customers we are talking to would likely want to be supportive and sympathetic toward our anger, so they may say they agree that the company was in the wrong, which would make us even MORE upset with the purchase!

Which is honestly a bit unfair to the company, when you think about it. Because we didn’t reach out to them and give them a chance to help us with our problem.

Let’s come back to this in a moment and talk about what happens when you are excited with a purchase. You tell other customers, right? We know this is true from our own experiences for many reasons. We want to share with others what worked for us. Also, we probably want to ‘brag’ on ourselves to a degree by sharing what a ‘smart’ purchase we made.

The point is, we talk to others about our purchase in either scenario. But if you think about it, even when we have a positive experience with a purchase, are we really that likely to reach out to the company and communicate that to them?  Probably not.

So the onus, rightly or wrongly, is on the company to do everything it can to encourage the customer to give feedback on the purchase. If the customer is indifferent toward the purchase, they will likely ignore the request.

But if the customer is either very upset or very excited with the purchase, an invitation to give feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Now, many companies aren’t thrilled with the prospect of hearing from angry customers. It’s just human nature. But, if you can give a customer the support they need post-purchase, you greatly increase your chances of converting the upset customer into a happy one.

Let's scenario-plan what happens with an upset customer. As Winch's research found, 95% of the time that upset customer will NOT contact the company to give them a chance to resolve the issue, and will instead tell around 10-12 other customers what happened and why they are upset.

That 95% figure can be lowered if the company proactively encourages customers to contact them directly with post-purchase questions or concerns. This also has a host of other benefits, such as boosting trust.

But from a purely statistical standpoint, if those upset customers contact the company instead of complain to other customers, it means the online conversation about your brand will change. The pure volume of complaints about your brand online will decrease, which means the overall sentiment will become more positive.

Additionally, as customers connect with your brand, you will convert some of those complainers into happy customers. So they will go from creating negative content about your brand, to creating positive. Which further improves your brand’s online sentiment.

So don't fear connecting with upset customers, you will actually be improving satisfaction and sentiment around your brand by doing so!

I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, thanks so much for reading. If you enjoyed this issue of Backstage Pass, please hit the Like button and share it, thank you!

Mack