We've all seen the statistic that says that 4% of unhappy customers will actually go on to tell the company about their problem - clearly a huge problem for any organisation.
After all, it implies that your Voice of the Customer solution is going to fail 96% of the time, when you need it the most. Leaving you unable to find out why your customers are unhappy and rescue them before they become detractors.
But I’m not entirely convinced.
If a channel was available that allowed your customers to give their feedback with ease, would they really still hold back and suffer in silence?
I suspect that the real statistic is something like “only 4% of your unhappy customers make the effort to spontaneously tell you”.
I was visiting a client recently who works in the debt collection department of a large financial services organisation. Not the most obvious place to run a Voice of the Customer scheme when the primary focus is to extract money, but they are quite advanced in their thinking and have integrated Voice of the Customer across their business.
And their results speak for themselves:
- Invitation accepted to give feedback: 50%
- Invitation to give feedback declined: 12%
- Customer not invited to give feedback: 38%
What happened to the 4% of unhappy customers bothering to tell the organisation?
Over four times more people accept the invitation than decline it.
In debt collection!
It seems if you want to beat the dreaded 96% Voice of the Customer failure rate, then, quite simply, all you need to do is ASK.
Find out how your customers feel by asking for their feedback straight away at the moment of truth. Not through an exhaustive survey, but through a simple score and comment – making it easier for customers to tell you about their experience and enabling you to cut through the noise and get straight to what’s important to them.
And if you are not sure of who to ask, then ask everyone. Capturing customer feedback and analysing it in real-time allows you to uncover a much greater depth of insight.
If a large financial services organisation can get their Voice of the Customer solution to work powerfully and improve business value and customer experience in debt collection, then there really is no excuse for the rest of us!
Take a look at our Infographic for a few ways you can increase your customer feedback response rates:
