Can You Hear Me? Corporate America's Communication with Dissatisfied Customers

The story made all the media. A Columbia business professor wrote 240 upper-class New York restaurants to complain that he developed food poisoning after eating at their businesses. He alluded to reporting the incident to the Better Business Bureau, but wanted the restaurateurs to have the chance to "respond accordingly." Ordinarily, restaurants take food poisoning scares very seriously and a few began investigating. The restaurateurs found that it was all part of an ill-conceived research project, designed to measure vendor response to customer complaints. This story made the "Museum of Hoaxes" web site. The business professor was reprimanded and forced to apologize to all of the restaurants (Kifner). However, the real issue of this story was missed. Only 60 of the 240 restaurants responded. Obviously, these businesses adopted one of the halfdozen stances for dealing with customer complaints-ignore them and hope the angry customers go away. Only 60 responded, even when threatened with a bad report to the Better Business Bureau; and even when threatened with a health condition that could completely close their businesses. We maintain that complainers can be of real value. Customer-initiated complaining is one of the cheapest marketing research strategies available, plus these complaints offer a business the opportunity to increase satisfaction, thus making a customer more loyal. After all, it was the flood of complaint calls to their 1-800-GET COKE tollfree phone line that made Coca-Cola return the 66 classic" formula to the shelves and eventually phase out "new Coke" (Bear). One customer service training manual compiles several studies and offers this overview of handling complaints: -Eighty-five % of customers who stop buying from a company do so because they believe the company does not care about them or their business. -Only four % of disgruntled customers report their complaints to the company. The other 96 percent simply take their business elsewhere. -Over ninety-one % of customers who are dissatisfied with a company's products or services will not buy from the establishment again. -Customers who have a positive experience tell, on average, five people about their experience. -Sixty-five % of a company's business comes from repeat sales. -Lowering the percentage of customers who stop buying by as little as five % can increase a company's profits by as much as eighty-five %. -Acquiring new customers costs five to ten times more than keeping existing customers happy. -It's five times more costly to acquire new customers than to keep current ones. -Pre-Internet, unhappy customers told, on average, eight to sixteen people about their negative experience (Career Solutions 2002). It is the last point which led to this study. With today's free web sites and internet chat rooms, the number of people that unhappy customers contact is likely to be much higher. Indeed, in our home state of Florida, an unhappy customer has posted a web site called www.dumb-assDOT.com as retribution for the Florida Department of Transportation's treatment of him. Further, he purchased a billboard on Interstate 75, announcing the web site. The site invites other unhappy consumers to post their own gripes. To date, 3,488 hits have been recorded on the site, but 14,000 vehicles per day pass that billboard. Further, there are new entrepreneurial ventures that will help a consumer forward a complaint to the appropriate person at a company-- eComplaints.com, Planetfeedback.com, and eSatisfy.com. The consumer can receive a private reply or can have the reply posted to the site so everyone can read it. These companies make money by encouraging the companies to participate and pay a fee for the statistical analysis of the complaint information received. If, indeed, only four to five %Io of dissatisfied customers ever complain to the businesses (and who could really measure that? …