Yaicha

You’ve heard it before, I’m sure: customers who have a bad experience tell others about it, so the damage spreads. I found a study quantifying this phenomenon, and you can read about it in “Beware of Dissatisfied Consumers: They Like to Blab” on the Wharton business school’s website.

The study looked at retail customers’ shopping experiences in stores — no call center mentions at all — but it’s pretty easy to see how the findings would apply to callers’ experience with call center customer service. Unhappy customers are unhappy customers, no matter where or how they become unhappy.

Some of the key points that caught my attention:

* Overall, if 100 people have had a bad experience, a retailer stands to lose between 32 and 36 current or potential customers, according to the study.* The complaints have an even greater impact on shoppers who were not directly involved as the story spreads and is embellished, researchers found. Almost half those surveyed, 48%, reported they have avoided a store in the past because of someone else’s negative experience. For those who had encountered a problem themselves, 33% said they would “definitely not” or “probably not” return.

* Paula Courtney, president of The Verde Group, says the exponential power of negative word-of-mouth lies in the nature of storytelling. ‘As people tell the story the negativity is embellished and grows,’ she says. For example, the first time the story is told, it might be about a customer service representative who was rude. By the time the third or fourth person hears the story, the customer service representative becomes verbally abusive. ‘To make a story worth telling, there has to be some entertainment value, a shock value,’ says Courtney. ‘Storytelling hurts retailers and entertains consumers.’

* Indeed, the survey showed that 46% of those who had a problem expect they would definitely or probably experience the same problem in the future.

call center management