When Businesses Don't Respond To Their Customers

Kelly, over at Maximum Customer Experience, has a post titled, What Seems To Be The Problem Here, in which she asks several questions about companies responding to their customers’ complaints. 

I’ve posted about this before. (Two Ways You Can Beat Your Competition In The Online World & Tip #8 How To Build Better Rapport With Your Customers, for example.) Here are my responses to her questions.

What do you think of companies who hide their complaint department?

When I have been a regular, yea, even a loyal customer of a company and I contact them (usually via their Web site) and get no reply in return, my likelihood of doing business with them in the future plumments. If they don’t care about me, I don’t care about them.

How far are you willing to go to get through to them?

I’ve Googled addresses of CEO’s of companies when I couldn’t find a way to contact them on their Web site.

Does it influence your future buying decisions?

You betcha!. I once wrote a post blasting JC Penney for poor customer service. I sent a link to my blog post to their corporate headquarters. Within 24 hours I had an apology from the store manager who not only apologized, but told me what action he would take with his employees. I still shop there because of his timely apology.

On the other hand, as several of my posts mention, I have e-mailed Cavenders Western Wear with a suggestion that I thought would improve their sales and my customer experience. I never received a response. I have two growing boys who need jeans. I can shop at Sheplers, Kohls, Penneys, Old Navy, etc. Cavenders could have retained my loyalty even if they responded, “Thanks for sending us your suggestion, Glenn. We think it sucks, but we appreciate the thought.”

Does Your company do it better than most?

Um, er, maybe. I work for a six-state division of the American Cancer Society. We could definitely streamline our complaint process, but we do respond. We will be looking at how we can respond more quickly as well as being better at spotting any trends in complaints.

Business owners, set a standard of responding to all customer service communications within 24 business hours. Assign an intern or a manager trainee to monitor them. Their job is to sort the communications and forward it to the appropriate person for a timely response.  The first response merely acknowledges the communication and explains that someone will be contacting them shortly with a more detailed response.

Remember, it is seven or eight times more expensive to acquire a customer than it is to retain one.

Regards,

Glenn