82% Of U.S. Consumers Bail On Brands After Bad Customer Service

Read on TechCrunch:

The spotlight — or maybe the flood light — shines on bad customer service online. Companies should worry about public complaints and reports of their brand failures more than ever, suggests a new report from RightNow and Harris Interactive. Contrarily, they stand to make more money if they can deliver a superior experience, the report says.

The Customer Experience Impact 2010 report reveals that 82% of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer service experience. Of these, 73% cited rude staff as the primary pain point, and 55% said a company’s failure to resolve their problems in a timely manner drove them away.

Almost everybody surveyed, a full 95%, said after a bad customer experience they would “take action.” 79% of U.S. consumers said they blabbed about their negative customer experiences in public and amongst friends. Of consumers who took to social media sites including Facebook and Twitter to publicly air a complaint, 58% expected a response from the company, 42% expected a response from a company within a day, but only 22% said they’d actually gotten a response as a result of griping there.


In 2007, 60% of U.S. consumers said when they had a negative customer experience, they wanted to speak to a live agent about it. At that time, 26% preferred email, 5% chat, but Facebook and Twitter weren’t used by corporations to handle complaints and resolve problems. This year, 83% of U.S. consumers said they wanted to speak to a live agent, 66% preferred email, 12% chat, and 7% choose social networking sites when trying to resolve a problem.

The more digital communication options that consumers have, the more they crave human interaction in real time, apparently.

Customer Experience Management is Doing the Right Thing

I have a great respect for author and consultant Lynn Hunsaker. She recently published this in her blog and it bears repeating here:

Customer experience management must have these 9 qualities in order to consistently win your heart and a share of wallet:

Perspective: customer experience is defined entirely by the customer, not the solution provider.

Preventive: customer experience gravitates toward the easiest and nicest methods to get and use solutions that address customers’ needs.

Duration: customer experience encompasses the point from which customers become aware they have a need until they say that need is extinct.

Dynamic: customer experience evolves with the customers’ context – the purpose and circumstances of their need, and overall experience reference points.

Choice: customer experience is built on trust and mutual respect for variety; share of budget is more important than loyalty.

Multi-faceted: customer experience is measured by functional and emotional (social and personal) judgments related to the customers’ expectations.

Operational: customer experience is shaped by all the contributors to an organization’s processes, policies and culture, in addition to the physical product or service associated with the customer’s need.

Integrative: customer experience is impacted by the degree of alignment among departments, technologies, channels, etc.

Anticipatory: customer experience is ongoing, where the present and future are equally or more important than the past.