Why Silent Customers Cost More Than Those Who Complain
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Why Silent Customers Cost More Than Those Who Complain
And how to hear those who don’t speak up, before they are already gone.
The leader of a restaurant chain was telling me about a moment that stuck with him. A party of four finishes their meal without a single word of dissatisfaction, pays, and leaves. Two weeks later, a three-line Google review: cold service, we will not be back. No one in the restaurant saw it coming.
We come across this kind of scene often. And it illustrates the high cost of not having a customer experience program in place.
Silence costs more than a complaint
A customer who complains, you can recover with the right tools. He names the problem, and you get a second chance. The data we have gathered over the years shows that a customer whose complaint is well handled often becomes more loyal than a customer who never had a problem at all. This is the service recovery paradox.
The customer who stays silent, on the other hand, you cannot recover. He leaves, and he speaks negatively about the service or the product, to his family, to his colleagues, to Google.
