12 Ways to Show Unhappy Customers You Deserve a Second Chance [Infographic]

Studies show it takes a dozen positive experiences to make up for just one negative customer experience. Here’s a list of twelve positive customer experiences that can give you a second chance with unhappy customers.

12 Ways to Turn Unhappy Customers into Re-Satisfied Clients + Infographic

Turn these twelve points into a formal customer relationship repair policy that can help with unhappy customers.

1. Validate – Acknowledge the customer’s feelings, viewpoint, and validity of their complaint or dissatisfaction.

2. Apologize – Offer an apology – without excuses or downplaying – how your organization was at fault.

3. Amends – Offer the customer a remedy; something valuable or meaningful enough to make things right.

4. Plan of correction – Working with your staff (or even the customer), decide what will be done so that the problem does not recur.

5. Confirm – Communicate with the customer to let them know that you have taken action or implemented changes so that the problem will not happen (to them or to other customers) again.

6. Reassure – Get personally involved in observing or even conducting the next transaction they have with your organization to ensure that it goes smoothly.

7. Make contact – After the next customer transaction, make personal contact by phone, email or in person to make sure that they were happy.

8. Ask for more feedback – Ask if there are any other concerns or suggestions they have – whether it’s about their initial complaint or some other area of the customer experience.

9. Solicit their involvement – Invite them to participate on a focus group or in future surveys to help you identify new ways to improve the customer experience.

10. Make them feel valued – Extend free membership, waiver of dues or fees, or some kind of inclusion in other “insider” or specially-treated customer segments.

11. Show your appreciation – When a customer stays and gives your organization a second chance, show your appreciation again a few months down the road with a gift card or thank you gift (flowers, gift basket or another token).

12. Prove you’re serious about doing better – Depending on the severity of the problem they experienced, show that you are serious about wanting them to stay by offering extended discounts or special pricing on certain items in perpetuity or for a given length of time.

It Takes 12 Positive Experiences to Make Up for One Negative Customer Experience – Is Your Business Up to the Challenge?

For every one customer who actually complained, two dozen – or more –  unhappy customers may have remained silent about a disappointing experience with your organization (or may have even left without saying why). This is why it’s so important to resolve customer complaints and concerns. When you consider the cost of new customer acquisition and the amount of resources most organizations devote to lead attraction and conversion, it’s clear that customer retention should also be prioritized when it comes to marketing initiatives.

Every business should have a process to repair and salvage customer relationships which is automatically triggered when a valid complaint, negative review or another indicator that a customer has had a bad experience occurs. Every business should have a formal policy which can be employed in order to protect their reputation, limit collateral damage and – if possible – provide an opportunity to save the relationship with unhappy customers.

Why?

• 86% of consumers have quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience – up from 59% just four years ago! (Harris Interactive, Customer Experience Impact Report)
• 91% of unhappy customers that defect will not willingly do business with the organization again (Lee Resource Inc.)
• For every customer that complains, 26 others (on average) remained silent (Lee Resource Inc.)
• The average dissatisfied customer will tell 9-15 people about their poor experience; one in ten will tell more than 20 people (White House Office of Consumer Affairs)

On the other hand, happy customers who get their issue resolved tell 4-6 people about their positive experience.

Every organization should have a formal “customer relationship repair” policy in place. Is your organization prepared to deal effectively with an unhappy customer? If it truly takes twelve positive experiences to turn an unhappy client into a satisfied customer, you will need to have more than one tactic at the ready in order to turn things around.