Duh! Unhappy Customers Can Ruin Your Business
Here’s one website/ blog where you don’t want to find out that your Customer Experience has failed: PissedConsumer.com
Yes, there’s a website dedicated to giving unhappy consumers voice. These customers name names, tell their sides of the story and potentially reach thousands of other people. I’m betting that you aren’t going to print this and give it to your corporate affairs person, for fear of causing a heart attack or stroke…
It is an old saw in the business world that a happy customer 
tells one person about their delightful customer experience, while an unhappy customer tells ten. With the increasing use of the internet, particularly Web 2.0, social networking sites, and blogs, do you have much doubt that an determined unhappy customer has the ability to tell way more than ten people about her unhappy experience?
A couple of lessons that must be learned here. First, you should make it EASY for unhappy customers to complain — but complain to you. You want people who’ve had bad experiences to tell YOU about it — not their hundreds of friends on FaceBook. Create or enhance feedback mechanisms at your company to ensure that feedback reaches the ears of someone who can listen, ask questions if necessary and begin the process of making things right. And, by gosh, act on this feedback!
Second, ensure that your company has a robust Voice of the Customer architecture that includes all feasible touchpoints. Don’t just let people send letters to Corporate Affairs (and your CEO) without capturing this feedback and seeing whether your formal customer feedback systems (e.g., customer satisfaction research) jive with what this less formal channels tell you. Is your customer service phone system connected to your sales department? Do your web portal people send feedback to product development? Is your marketing department actively looking for all the places in cyberspace where people might be giving feedback about your company (good and bad)?
Taking the time to build out your Voice of the Customer architecture now will prevent the kind of phone call you will receive from the President of your company when her husband Googles the company and finds a scathing review on a site like PissedConsumer.com.
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