Customer Obsession: The Antidote to Customer Revenge

Recently The Wall Street Journal sounded the alarm on “customer revenge,” citing a study of 1,000 consumers, which showed that 74% of customers experienced a problem with a product or services in the past year, up from 66% in 2020 and that 32% of those who complained posted about their most serious problems on social media, which is double the proportion of those who did in 2020.?? Customer Care Measurement & Consulting , the purveyors of the National Customer Rage Study, are suggesting that customers are adopting a mindset that “if you as a company don’t really seem to care, well then I’m going to take to the streets.”

Frankly customers taking to the “streets” (aka social media or consumer advocacy groups) to express their frustrations with product or service that they have received is nothing new.??Think negative reviews on Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc.??Yet, the Wall Street Journal may be on to something as customers now have more channels where they can complain, the rate at which they’re doing so definitely seems to be increasing, and the complaints are being made more personal by sharing them with their own networks of friends and/or followers vs. generic complaints in Yelp etc.??The question is what’s fueling this more aggressive posture on the part of customers.

Before the pandemic, companies could assume that customers were coming in with a blank slate or even with a baseline favorable opinion of their business that would be moved up (more favorable) or down (less favorable) by the experience delivered.??Their job would be to deliver an experience that would move the needle from that neutral-to-positive baseline to the utmost positive position and in the process convert customers from casual consumers to loyal fans as well as organic promoters for the business.

Now that has all changed, and when customers interact with your business, it’s not just your own customer experience you have to be concerned with, it’s the overall disruptive environment that you’re operating within.??When customers engage with you, they’re very often coming in with frayed nerves.??There’s chaos all around them.??Everyday they’re hearing about fights breaking out on planes, near misses or planes clipping one another on the runways, prices for staples that are off the charts, shortages of every imaginable kind (e.g., automobiles, baby formula, eggs), friction between employers and employees, layoffs, and so on.??Chances are your customer hasn’t just heard about these things; they’ve personally experienced them.??

As a result of this pandemic hangover, when customers connect with you, they’re often coming in with a negative baseline as concerns the upcoming experience with your business.??Assume a baseline of -5, maybe even -10.??You must overcome all that just to get customers to positive territory let alone get them into the promoter range.??The most effective way to accomplish this is if businesses plan for the negative baseline scenario from the outset and optimize all of their channels to provide customers with an oasis of calm in the midst of all of the chaos.??

For in-person interactions, customer-facing employees should be primed to provide a reassuring environment that leaves the customer feeling like they’re welcomed, cared for, and appreciated.??Customers should feel like there is a genuine effort to address their inquiry, the process to get to an outcome is seamless, and that the outcome arrived at meets or exceeds their expectations.??Where customers engage through technology, it needs to be designed so that whenever they have to use it, the user experience feels like it’s been thought through to anticipate what customers need to get done and provide the simplest possible path to accomplish it.??This is what Customer Obsession looks like in practice.

Businesses ought to see the current disruptive environment as an opportunity to differentiate themselves by being truly Customer Obsessed.??That means putting an extreme focus on the customer, which results in adopting policies, taking actions and making investments in the customer’s favor even when they can’t immediately connect the dots to their own financial benefit because they know it always pans out in the end when you take the position that if it’s good for customers it’s good for business.??

It’s safe to say that companies that adopt this strategy won’t have to worry about customer revenge.??In fact, just the opposite, they can expect to generate an army of customer advocates, which is well worth its weight in gold.

Sometimes executives are skeptical that Customer Obsession could result in stacking the odds in the customer’s favor too much but suffice it to say that no company that has obsessed over customers has ever regretted it.??In fact, companies that have a reputation for Customer Obsession also have a track record of generating extraordinary business results, including Amazon, Apple, Costco, Trader Joe’s, Zappos and more.??Additional details about the extraordinary business results delivered by Customer Obsessed companies can be found in the book Blueprint for Customer Obsession .

Meanwhile, as an antidote to the current disruptive environment, businesses would do well to embrace Customer Obsession as a key business strategy.

Kudos to Katie Deighton for shedding light on customer revenge in her WSJ article - As Customer Problems Hit a Record High, More People Seek ‘Revenge’ and kudos to Scott Broetzmann for the research that laid the foundation for it.

#cx #customerexperience #customerobsessed #customerobsession

Marbue Brown is author of the book Blueprint for Customer Obsession and founder of The Customer Obsession Advantage