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• Silence is NOT Golden

Silence is NOT Golden

written on July 06, 2009 by Ingeborg Hrabowy

If you think that your customers are happy because you aren't hearing any complaints, think again.  Silence is not a good metric for customer satisfaction.

Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm, recently conducted a survey of major U.S. corporations and reported this finding:

An average business loses 50% of its customers every five years.

Think about this.  Five years from now, there is a good chance that half of your current customers will no longer be doing business with you.  And because the attrition will be slow and gradual, chances are also good that you won't notice when they actually leave!

For the most part, customers are patient.  They will tolerate bad service, mistakes, and other inconveniences for some length of time, all the while becoming progressively more unhappy until they reach a point of no return.  At which point they won't return.

The vast majority of "getting unhappier" customers won't say a word to you about the situation.   They will tolerate whatever is bugging them because of their relationship with you, an attitude that to err is human and mistakes should be forgiven, or inertia-they don't want to go to the trouble to find another vendor or service provider.  However, all of these reasons have tolerance limits.  Once you have gone beyond that limit, your customer will silently depart.

So if customer silence isn't a good gauge of customer happiness, what are some early warning signs that there might be trouble in your client base?  One way is to track customer buying patterns.  If you have an account that has decreased in purchases, or even stayed the same over an extended period of time, consider looking closer.  There might be correctable reasons why this account isn't growing.

Another strategy is to create ways to get your clients to complain.  Customers who complain are best; they give you the opportunity to fix things before they walk out the door.  Complaints give you free feedback that would cost a fortune from a research company.  Furthermore, one person's grievance is likely relevant for at least a part of your client base.  Set up a process that makes it easy and satisfying for customers to complain and invite them to participate.

Finally, one of the best ways to break customer silence is to be proactive.  Dump the feedback form and telephone satisfaction surveys-go out yourself and ask customers how you're doing.  Have a live dialog with them, make it clear that you are sincere in soliciting their feedback, and act on their complaints.  Fix the problem and then let them know that you did so.

Your customers don't want to leave.  They will give you a chance to woo them back, and you should take it.  And if you are wondering if it's really worth the trouble to solicit and act on customer complaints, consider this statistic from the same Bain & Company survey: The cost of gaining a new customer is 7 to 10 times greater than keeping the ones you have.  You will grow your business much faster by getting your customers to complain than by listening to the sounds of silence.

Printed with Premission of the OneCoach Team 2005  www.onecoach.com 1-800-863-2622