Customer Service And Forgiveness
October 7, 2011 2 Comments
In honor of the last day of Customer Service Week I did an analysis that cuts across two recent reports, Temkin Customer Service Ratings and Temkin Forgiveness Ratings. The question I explored is what portion of consumers are dissatisfied with customer service and are not willing to forgive that company. That represents a group of very unhappy consumers. Here’s the data:
TV service providers, ISPs, and health plans have the most of these very unhappy customers, which shouldn’t surprise too many people. Banks, on the other hand, have fewer of these sulking customers, but they have the highest percentage of customers that aren’t satisfied with customer service who aren’t forgiving.
The bottom line: Don’t count on forgiveness to overcome your customer service miscues
About Bruce Temkin, CCXP
Customer Experience Matters® 
Bruce, great stats! Thanks so much for sharing. As you show, with an average of 22 to 25 percent of customers across various industries being dissatisfied with customer service, companies need to act on these numbers and start to make improvements. Hopefully, your research will get their attention. If you add up all of these dissatisfied customers in terms of dollars, I’m sure the potential losses to these companies are in the billions. This type of data can hopefully get senior executives to move from thinking about service to doing something about it.
Richard Shapiro, The Center For Client Retention
Very interesting stats indeed!
I think it is quite remarkable how (comparatively) forgiving customers are for the retailers. Of those dissatisfied with the service, more than a third is forgiving. I wonder whether this also extends to the retailer’s private label’s products or only to their general service.
Tim Smits