For most companies, only 10 percent of complaints are ever articulated by customers. The other 90 percent are unarticulated and manifest themselves in many negative ways: unpaid invoices; lack of courtesy to your front line service reps; and above all, negative word of mouth. With the internet, especially social media, an unhappy customer can now reach thousands of your would-be customers in a few keystrokes. Head off bad press before it happens. Make it easy for customers to complain, and treat complaints seriously. Establish firm guidelines regarding customer response time, reporting and trend analysis. Make employee complaint monitoring a key tool for executive decision making.
Action Step: Review every customer touch point within your company. Brainstorm with staff on how to turn each customer touch point into an opportunity to capture customer complaints and other feedback. Experiment with how to make the feedback mechanism as easy for customers as possible.
Source: Griffin, Jill. Customer Loyalty: How To Earn It How To Keep It. 2002.