Whats Worse Than Delivering A Bad Customer Experience?

Ignoring a customer who after having a bad experience, makes the effort to share his feedback to help you understand where did the slip up happen.

Last week, I blogged about my not so great experience of watching a movie at INOX Cinemas. I  shared my feedback to the cinema by the following methods:

• I gave my feedback to the employees there at the cinema itself.
• I tweeted my blog post (and tagged their official twitter account)  which not only chronicled my experience but also shared some ideas about how they could learn from the same and improve the overall experience for their customers going forward.
• I went to their website and used their contact us form to share the same to them through email.

I am yet to receive a response either to my email to the tweet that i shared. Now this ignorance, not only makes me believe that they are not interested in providing good customer experience and do not care about what their customers feel. By ignoring the feedback, they have also lost a great opportunity to improve their service delivery and at the same time a raving fan in me.

What could they have done to change my experience:

• First and foremost, respond immediately. It could be a simple one line email indicating that they are thankful to me for the feedback provided and that they would look into the feedback constructively.
• Take appropriate measure to ensure that such delivery failures don’t recur.
• They could have converted me into a fan by offering me a couple ticket complementary for my next visit to their cinema, so that I can experience the result of my feedback to them.

In that case, instead of writing this blog, I would have been blogging about the awesome response from them, which is good publicity for them. Also, I would have shared this little story with my family, friends and anyone else who would listen to me.

This would have reinforced the belief in those people that if something doesn’t work, it is indeed a good idea to provide feedback to them so it can be fixed.

What do you do with the feedback that you receive?

It is critical for every business to understand the fact that we are all in business only because there are customers who are willing to do business with us. So, when they stop and complaint about something or provide feedback, it is absolutely essential for us to take this seriously. In fact, it is worth celebrating the fact that our customers are still engaged with us enough to care about our business and hence provide feedback/complaint.

Each and every one of these complaints or feedback that we receive is an opportunity for us to create a stronger bond with the customer who gave us the feedback and a much better experience to all our other customers.

So, what do you do with customers who provide feedback?

PS: An interesting and a good book that talks about how complaints can be used strategically is A Complaint Is a Gift. I would strongly recommend that you read this book if you are either leading an organization or are part of the customer facing teams. 

Micah Solomon, in his post on Forbes talks about “Rules for compensating customers for service failure” which is interesting.