Customer Dissatisfaction Impact

There are numerous reasons to worry about dissatisfied customers. The most obvious concern is that when you lose customers you lose business, so the goal is to improve your customer satisfaction efforts and keep customers from coming back. In addition, there are issues with word of mouth marketing, online reviews, and other factors that can hurt your company’s long term potential. One of the key factors that makes customer dissatisfaction such a problem is not just that it indicates your company isn’t doing its part at maintaining customers – it’s that most dissatisfied customers are unwilling to change their opinions about a company, no matter what type of marketing or satisfaction efforts you put into place.

Several studies have shown that when a customer has a bad customer satisfaction experience, they put that experience above all else. One bad experience (where “bad” is relative to the reaction the individual has to the experience) and the customer’s relationship with the company is tarnished forever. They are unwilling to change their minds or forgive the company, no matter what the company puts into place.

That means that by the time you see that your customer satisfaction scores are slipping, the “bad” numbers are customers that you may never be able to get back. These are the customers that, once they stop shopping at your company, claim they will never give your company another chance. While businesses may not have a truly limited supply of customers, each customer does represent an investment, and every bad experience loses that customer forever.

Now, it’s possible that these claims are simply out of anger. Time does cause people to forgive companies for their bad customer service, especially if they have a good reason to use the company’s products or services again. A customer that claims they will not go back may still use the company somewhere down the road.

But at that point you are simply speculating, and there is little your company can do to expect or hope the customer will forgive the customer service transgression. What it does indicate, however, is that dissatisfied customers are a real problem for your company. They may not be able to be won back no matter what you put into place, and how you address the problems they had with your company may need to focus on preventing new customer service problems, rather than expecting that your efforts will change the minds of those that your service already affected.