Customer dissatisfaction undermines brand equity whenever the brand fails to deliver something important to the customer. Usually, this is something basic that the customer took for granted—something that was once an innovation and a source of positive satisfaction, but which customers now simply expect as part of the standard product or service. Consider automated teller machines. Today, ATM’s are a commodity. They no longer distinguish one bank from another and are not a significant source of positive customer satisfaction—yet they can certainly cause dissatisfaction.
A Common Transaction
Imagine you are on a business trip in an unfamiliar city and find that the only ATM near your hotel is out of order, out of cash or has a problem with your card. At that moment, how do you feel about that bank? Grateful to it for providing a conveniently located ATM? Absolutely not: You probably feel enraged or let down.
Contrast this with the same situation where the ATM works—as in, you get the cash. How does that feel? Has your attitude toward the bank changed as a result of the transaction? Not at all. Chances are, minutes after getting the cash, you’ll have forgotten all about the transaction. Think about the impact on the brand. An ATM that works will do little if anything to increase customer satisfaction and strengthen brand equity apart from reinforcing awareness. But one that doesn’t work will create dissatisfaction and may perceptibly damage the brand.
Identifying Dissatisfaction Should Be a Top Priority
For an existing business trying to increase overall customer satisfaction an loyalty, the first priority should be to identify and reduce the drivers of customer dissatisfaction with your brand. The main drivers usually reflect failure to provide some of the basics and can include egregiously bad performance on product or service features (such as fuel economy or, in service businesses, polite staff) that also have the potential to provide positive customer satisfaction.
You’ll almost certainly need to fix a number of basic things in order to ensure that you’re reliably delivering the current brand promise to meet customer expectations. only then can you switch your main focus toward the new and exciting things marketers love such as new products, new service packages, new channels and new creative advertising ideas.
It’s important take both short and long term views. People sometimes talk as if there were an inherent trade-off between improving your delivery of the basics and innovating to get ahead of the competition. In the short term, that can be true, to the extent that you have only so much management attention span, but in the long run it’s wrong. Reliably delivering on your current promise builds the trust that lies at the heart of every successful brand as well as a culture based on customer focus, openness, high standards and attention to detail. These, in turn, provide the basis for successful customer-focused innovation—the primary driver of lasting organic profit growth—which, in turn, reinforces the brand and keeps it relevant.
Why Managing Dissatisfaction Is So Difficult
Intellectually, there is nothing hard about any of this. It’s plain common sense that, before you start doing difficult and risky things like radical innovation, you should first do the easier things that are almost guaranteed to increase long-term profits, such as not annoying your customers.
Some of the issues are psychological and some political. One underlying problem is that taking the customer’s perspective rather than one’s own goes somewhat against human nature. Our own lives and our colleagues’ problems inevitably capture more of our attention than those of our clients and customers. Dale Carnegie wrote about seeing things from others’ perspectives, and would not probably not have become so famous for doing so if this was something everyone did naturally. The extent to which people are interested in helping other people seems to vary significantly between individuals, depending on their genes and early upbringing, so the recommendation is recruit people with the right values, even if others have more relevant experience and knowledge.
Obviously, this is a question of balance for both independent and enterprise businesses. Companies need employees with technical knowledge as well as good customer skills (and, ideally, some strong on both dimensions). But the general idea that it’s easier to teach people new knowledge and skills rather than to change their basic values and personality still holds. Other reasons why companies keep letting down their customers include:
(1) It’s more inspiring to work on things that are new, exciting and, potentially newsworthy than on minor improvements aimed at annoying customers less;
(2) By definition, whenever customers are dissatisfied, either someone or some system is at fault, or could at least have performed better;
(3) In addition, dealing with dissatisfied customers is rarely fun.
By bringing a range of data to bear on the problem, market researchers can play a key role in helping companies get around these problems, tackle the drivers of customer dissatisfaction, and build trust and brand equity, the foundation for long-term organic profit growth.
Handling Customer Complaints and Lapsed Customers
Finally, a crucial source of insights on customer dissatisfaction is complaints. Everyone knows that customer complaints have the potential to help companies improve their delivery of the brand promise, as well as often suggesting ways to make that promise more relevant, but few organizations use this rich source as actively and systematically as they could. You should positively encourage people to complain if they’re disappointed, and then:
(1) Monitor trends, to see which problems seem to occur most and/or seem to be increasing;
(2) Prioritize your improvement efforts; and
(3) Follow-up with individual cases to identify root causes;
(4) Create an analysis and action plan to reduce the likelihood of recurrence.
An additional benefit of following-up on complaints quickly and vigorously is that outstanding service recovery usually repairs the damage to the brand in the mind of the complainant and sometimes even leads to more loyalty than before the problem occurred (the service recovery paradox).
A related, even richer, source of well informed dissatisfaction data is lapsed or defected customers. These are people who know your brand well and have chosen to take their business elsewhere. If you can reach them, they can tell you a lot about where you have been going wrong. Again, there is always a chance of bringing them back to your brand if you convince them that you really want their business and will correct whatever drove them away (assuming it was not just an insanely low price from a competitor).
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