I’ve just seen some really interesting results in an article in the March Edition of The Customer Experience Journal from Bruce Temkin across at the Temkin Group, a US a customer experience research and consulting firm.
The article is a digest of stuff that is going on with the Temkin Group, notable stuff in the world of customer experience and previews new research that they are producing.
Their most recent piece of research is called: How Consumers Give Feedback (the full report will cost you $195). Through their research they were able to survey 6,000 US consumers about how they most frequently gave feedback about Very Good and Very Bad experiences. Analysing their response, they found that when customers have a Very Good or a Very Bad experience with a business they found that they most frequently tell their friends about that experience via email, phone or in-person.
I’m not sure that is a real surprise.
There is a caveat here that this data is for US consumers but I do believe that there are some broad parallels that can be drawn for many ‘western’ businesses. Check out the summary results in the graphic below:
However, what I do think is interesting is some of the other results where they show
- Only small percentages of people placed reviews or comments on social media sites, whether the experience was good or bad;
- People are more likely to talk if it is a Very Bad experience than if it is a Very Good experience;
- 37% of all respondents said that even after a Very Good experience they did not tell anyone about it; and
- 25% of respondents didn’t tell anyone about a Very Bad experience.
The last two are the ones that trouble me.
- Why do 37% of all respondents that have had a Very Good experience not talk about it?
- Is it because that’s just the way they are ‘built’ and it’s not in their nature to share or is it that we as business have not given the right tools to share their experiences? and
- How many of the 25% of respondents that have had a Very Bad experience and do not tell anyone never go back or do business with that company again?
- I’ve talked about this before in Are You Not Getting Many Customer Complaints But Are Still Losing Customers? and, I think the solution has to be to go and look for those ‘unspoken’ complaints.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks to Katie Tegtmeyer for the image.