Skinned knees heal. Broken arms mend. Wounded feelings and damaged trust don't often repair themselves as easily or reliably.
In business, as in relationships, you cannot count on nature or time to heal wounds. Despite the saying that time heals all wounds, smart businesses seek out customers (or former customers) who are feeling wounded. They seek them out and talk to them.
Talking to disappointed customers has many benefits:
- You have an opportunity to right the wrong. This can often turn a bad experience into a good one for the customer.
- You learn quickly what isn't going right so you can address the problem before it disappoints more customers.
- By reaching out to customers, and making this a routine practice, you help to evolve your culture into one that is more caring and customer-focused.
- After you have shown a customer that you care enough to learn about their problems and concerns and take steps to address them, you are likely to increase the loyalty of that customer.
- You are also likely to turn negative word-of-mouth into positive testimonial. This is powerful in two ways. First you get someone talking positively about you and your brand. Second, because negative word-of-mouth spreads many times faster than positive word-of-mouth, you stem a tide of mind-changing bad publicity.
Often times, when you take time to listen to customers' concerns, you will find that the problems are not ones that you were aware of before you listened. And sometimes they aren't hard to fix. Furthermore, you will find that most customers understand that you cannot change everything. They will understand that even when you can change something, you might not be able to make the change in time to impact their personal experience. They also understand that because you took the time to listen to them, that they are important to you.
I had a boss and mentor once who said that the customers who complained were our greatest friends. "They are taking their time to tell us where we made a mistake and how we can get better. We pay consultants lots of money for the same advice!"
