To have 10% of your customers be unhappy is an accepted norm and it is bound to happen whether you like it or not. It could be because of a fault in the product or service, packaging, delivery or higher expectations on the customer’s part. Your unhappy customers will vent their anger on you whenever they find an opportunity. Collecting feedback and acknowledging their anger will go a long way towards reducing the same. Do not give them the opportunity to go to the industry or media and paint a negative picture of your business.
Business Psychologists say that 62% of your unhappy customers i.e. 6% of your overall customers will be happy if they can speak to the customer service and sort out the problem. This will give them a chance to vent their anger and be calm. However there are some customers who will still be unhappy and have a grudge on you and promise themselves to destroy you. These kinds of customers form only 38% of unhappy customers or 4% of your total customers whom you can neglect.
Encouraging positive reviews is an effective way to reduce your negative reputation. Since as a business you do not collect reviews from your contented customers, only the reviews of unhappy customers will be visible and that shall give a bad picture about your business. Stats say that “It takes 12 positive reviews to negate one negative review”. If so, then why not improve the positive reviews.
Let us take an classic example from the below chart.
Assuming we have 100 customers where 90 are happy and 10 are unhappy. When you have no positive reviews, it is the 10 negative reviews that flare and is the talk of the town. However assuming if 25 customers give review then the 15 positive reviews and 10 negative reviews might balance to some level, but however since we know that 12 positive = 1 negative, still the negative review would have it’s impact. However when you collect reviews from 50% of your customers, then there would be 40 positive against 10 negative, which is a good deal for a business. But the greatness would come only when they collect reviews from all the 100 customers where 90 reviews are positive against 10 negative reviews. This changes the entire game and people would trust your business better than the competitor.
Therefore it is imperative to encourage the collection of positive reviews from your customers and to promote them on the internet. Let the world see what good you do. There are many tools like TestimonialsFor which do this activity for you.