Brand owners have witnessed a 34 per cent increase in customer complaints since the beginning of the recession, according to contact centre specialist ContactBabel, which claims this has resulted in more than 140 million extra negative phone calls.
The rise in moans is detailed in a new report, Customer 2.0 – Customer Experience and Profitability in the New Economy. It says that some of this increase can be put down to more failures in business processes that are exacerbated by a general reduction in the investment needed to improve them.
However, it warns: “It is unlikely that businesses have fallen to pieces quite as spectacularly as these figures suggest. It is more likely that the recession has driven more consumers to display negativity, stress and intolerance of mistakes.”
And there are additional findings to bear out this interpretation. The proportion of customers that give a business a maximum customer satisfaction rating (e.g. “10 out of 10”) has declined from 78 per cent in mid-2006 to a low of 61 per cent in mid-2009. Generally, it seems fair to say that customer sentiment is on the way down.
Report author Steve Morrell, principal analyst at ContactBabel said: “The post-recession customer demands better service and if they don’t receive it, they can – and will – tell others about it. Businesses need to be able to handle the new customer – dissatisfied, mobile, vocal, knowledgeable and multichannel.”
The report recommends a three-stage methodology of customer experience improvement: ‘Measure – Understand – Improve’:
Measure: capture a mixture of delayed and immediate customer experience data for maximum insight coupled with fire-fighting abilities
Understand: compare data over time, against competitors, alternative channels and best practices, getting the relative picture as well as the absolute
Improve: beware of customer experience engagements failing here, due to the need to get more than one department to make changes – a top-level champion is vital to the process.
