Customers, or potential customers, that are unsatisfied with the service they receive have many things going for them, particularly if they have time and are rattled enough.
A lone dissatisfied customer will often be seen as bleating, but once he's teamed up with others the situation becomes much more serious. And the vehicles are there for teaming to occur: moaning on Facebook, reporting on Twitter, find another dissatisfied new friend, favouritism in the press are all routes for dissatisfied customers to contact one another, and share and respond to their experiences.
It becomes serious because one lone person having a bad experience isn't demonstration of a trend. Many bad experiences are most emphatically the description of bad to terrible services.
And reports of such experiences can achieve two things: such experiences usually terrify new and existing customers, and they open the routes for more dissatisfied customers to team up to share ideas on retribution.
There tolls the bells for what was a perfectly good business and a decent livelihood.
But, for forward-thinking businesspeople, customer dissatisfaction is also evidence of a flaw in their services, and one which should be addressed promptly. Doing so can achieve an enormous respect from the customer community, so much so that you could go to press, tell them what happened, and you have a rake of new customers from it.
Dissatisfied customers hate being ignored.
For strategic advice on managing customer dissatisfaction, contact Chalestra.