If every company in the world paid respect to the customers who felt positive about their experience working with the company as well as to customers who had negative experiences working with the company, our corporate worlds would be more profitable.
Why more profitable? Companies are eager to uncover, publicize and share the great testimonials about their goods and services. Can you identify a successful company that is eager to uncover, publicize and share the testimonials that are not so positive about them? Name me one company that is being that truthful about their customer retention and satisfaction levels!
There has been a proliferation of websites and publicized works that provide candid feedback on goods and services offered by companies. In fact, I rarely buy anything without consulting Consumers Reports first because I consider those staffers to be more objective than the company offering the goods. Other websites such as Yelp, Epinions and Vault, for example, provide information about the experience others have had with a company. These sites are booming with visitors and bloggers. Why? One reason they are so popular is that we consumers have come to mistrust a company’s own assessment of itself.
We know companies will tell us about what they do quite well but we don’t have faith that they will tell us their shortcomings. They may even fail to tell us properly about what they do well but we know we won’t read about their own critiquing from their own website. We have to scour the Internet to find that feedback from other sources. That’s pretty unfortunate because so much of the information on our great Internet is not trustworthy but we would rather trust strangers than buy from a company without doing some sort of review.
How can a company participate in being a frontrunner to this process of truth telling about customer satisfaction? For one, they can ensure that formal training is provided for all of their service providers and customer service departments. These people should be trained to capture and appreciate the rave reviews as well as the angry criticisms. As we have written about before, the number one thing customers want from their goods/services provider is to be heard.
In addition, companies can begin to be honest. What would you think of a company that publicly posted information about their shortcomings or perhaps data from a recent customer satisfaction assessment? If the company would publish the honest information, the other sites such as vault.com, may start to get less traffic. Let’s pick on a nameless law firm and pretend this type of truth telling could look something like this:
We have an 85% client retention rate. Of the 15% that do not return to use our services, 8% engaged our attorneys for events that only occur one time, 3% went out of business and 4% were so angry and dissatisfied with us they fled to our competition and we were unable to save the relationships.
That would be refreshing to me because now I know I would be dealing with a company that has a shot at being honest and truthful with me. Truthful customer satisfaction levels will entice customers, not repel customers. That means more profits, plain and simple.
