Customer Care Measurement & Consulting

Reflections On The 2025 National Customer Rage Survey

admin — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 08:00:16 +0000

The Marketplace Meltdown: Navigating Rage, Uncivility, And The New Frontlines of Business-To-Customer Conflict

By: Scott M. Broetzmann and David Beinhacker

Twenty-two years ago, we set out to replicate a dusty 1976 White House study on customer complaints, never imagining we’d find ourselves chronicling a societal shift from mere dissatisfaction to full-throated rage. Back then, my co-author Marc Grainer thought adding a few questions about hostile customers was a fool’s errand. Today, as we release our 11th National Customer Rage Survey, those “silly” questions have evolved into a diagnostic toolkit for decoding modern marketplace warfare.

The years since our last report in 2022 read like a dystopian playbook. The tragic murder of United Healthcare’s CEO during a protest over prior authorization policies. Viral videos of airline passengers fist fighting over reclined seats. Chatbots being “taught” to de-escalate death threats. Indeed, we’ve entered an era where customer rage mutates faster than a coronavirus strain. Complaint handling has become less about service recovery than conflict mediation and assuaging the ire of conscientious consumers who prioritize ethical, social, and environmental factors when making purchasing decisions.

Marketplace Conflict: A New Conceptualization Of A Cultural Fault Line

Having devoted more than two decades to the study of complaint handling and angry customers, we know plenty about the everyday customer rage stemming from product and service problems. But to narrowly focus solely on this single form of hostility may be to miss a bigger picture of the other forms of aggression that are becoming increasingly commonplace on Main Street USA. What we are witnessing is not just an epidemic of fuming customers, but the dawn of a broader, seismic shift – a new era of broader and diversified marketplace conflict. This construct of marketplace conflict stretches well beyond a conventional and transactional form of business-to-consumer friction (that is “customer rage”) to recognize the reality of what may be four different (but related) varieties of discord between companies and their customers and organizations and their constituents:

Customer Rage
Customer Uncivility
Crisis Driven Incidents
Economic Class Warfare

By way of introduction, here are a few early thoughts about the emerging framework for rethinking marketplace conflict.

Marketplace Conflict – Customer Rage Triggered By Product & Service Problems

Customer rage is the classic, visceral reaction to specific, transactional problems with products and services – exploding in the moment when expectations are shattered. Perhaps in a generation prior, the notion of “customer rage” may have been regarded as hyperbole. Today, customers routinely “go off” about their product and service complaints. Owing to 20+ years of investigation, we know a great deal about customer rage. If you’re looking for a pulse check on the American marketplace, the numbers are both a fever and a warning. Our 2025 survey reveals that:

77% of customers reported experiencing a product or service problem in the past year—a rate that has more than doubled since 1976.
Two out of every three customers with a problem feel rage (64%), and half (50%) raised their voice to express displeasure—a record high.
The emotional toll on customers is equally sobering: 32% of customers cite emotional stress as a direct result of their complaint resolution experience.
Digital complaining is the primary mode of grousing (vs. telephone), yet 43% of social media complaints vanish into the algorithmic ether, up from 32% in 2022.
Revenge-seeking – while down a bit from 2022 – has nonetheless tripled since 2020, with 7% of customers openly admitting to it.

These aren’t just statistics—they’re the warning lights on the dashboard of the American marketplace. Three of these indicators warrant especially close examination and discussion in the coming years.

The first indicator highlights the need to unpack the factors behind rising complainant satisfaction, which has reached historic levels. After remaining stagnant for more than forty years, complainant satisfaction has steadily increased over the past three waves of the Rage Study. Currently, 40% of complainants report being delighted or completely satisfied with how their issues were resolved. This trend prompts key questions: Does this uptick signify a genuine transformation in corporate complaint handling, or are customers simply becoming more effective at voicing their grievances? Likely, both forces are at play. On one hand, customers are perceiving real improvements: the proportion of Americans rating customer care as “Excellent” rose from 12% (2002–2022) to 19% in 2025. On the other, consumers’ expectations are clearly rising. Sixty-eight percent now describe complaining as effortful (up from 65% in 2022), and 50% of those with issues report raising their voices—an all-time high. It remains to be seen which dynamic will have greater influence.

A second indicator draws attention to the role of socioeconomic status in customer care outcomes. The 2025 study shows that, for certain measures of wealth, the saying “fortune follows the wealthy” holds true. Complainants who identify as “upper class” are nearly twice as satisfied with resolution outcomes compared to those in the “middle, working, and lower classes.” This gap raises important questions: Do the “haves” wield more persuasive complaint strategies? Are they simply more persistent, or are companies more eager to please customers they consider valuable? Regardless of the cause, understanding the class-based dimensions of complainant satisfaction is essential for a complete picture.

The third indicator involves the migration from telephone to digital channels for lodging complaints. For the first time, 2022 saw digital complaints surpass those made by phone. Yet, the landscape is far from straightforward. Social media, poses new challenges: the proportion of complainants posting their issues on social platforms rose from 14% (2002–2022) to 24% in 2025, but 43% of these posts received no corporate response at all. This troubling lack of engagement is compounded by emerging challenges—including the risks posed by AI and fraud. The Better Business Bureau recently warned of a surge in impostor scams, with fraudulent actors creating fake customer support accounts to prey on individuals seeking help.

Together, these indicators point to vital questions for the future: What drives improvement in customer satisfaction? How do wealth and class shape complaint resolution? And can companies keep pace with the evolving risks and opportunities presented by digital engagement? Each merits ongoing scrutiny and deeper research.

Marketplace Conflict – Customer Uncivility Activated By Disagreement With Corporate Sociopolitical Positions

Likely additive to the aggressions stemming from customer rage, “customer uncivility” is sparked by customers calling out corporate values and sociopolitical positions that don’t align with their own. And the antagonisms from customer uncivility are becoming increasingly visible and outrageous in daily commerce. In March 2025 alone, organized consumer boycotts targeted major corporations such as Amazon, Target, Walmart & Tesla. Such collective action calls to mind the consumer unrest of the 1960s with one key difference. No longer limited to niche consumer groups and political activists, modern consumer consciousness has transmuted into more individualistic forms of protest. 2025 marks our second foray into customer uncivility (the inaugural year being 2022). Notably:

15% of Americans admit to personally engaging in uncivil behavior in the past year toward a business with whom they experienced some kind of sociopolitical or values conflict,
A majority – 55% – of our fellow citizenry believe customer uncivility is increasing, and 28% cite the “moral decay of society” as the primary reason for this trend – more than twice any other cause.
Nearly one-fifth of customers believe that “making verbal threats”, “making physical threats”, “making fun of/mocking a customer service rep” and “cursing/using profanity” are either “civil” behaviors or that “it depends on the circumstances”.

With two waves of data about customer uncivility, we’re beginning to make inroads into a deeper understanding of value-based conflict between businesses and their customers.

Marketplace Conflict – Crisis-Driven Incidents As A Form Of Conflict & Disruption

Sometimes the unpredictable, extreme, and aggressive behaviors observed in the marketplace have nothing whatsoever to do with a lousy product or service experience or an outburst resulting from acrimony over corporate sociopolitical stances—and you don’t need to do a formal study to appreciate this. Instead, the intensity and irrationality of some hostilities may stem from crisis-driven incidents that set off underlying mental or emotional challenges for certain individuals. For instance, the root cause for a passenger opening an emergency exit door midflight on an Asiana Airlines flight had no connection to the quality of the airline food or service, nor was it related to the airline’s sociopolitical stances. Instead, it resulted from a set of psychological and emotional factors specific to this traveler that may have been triggered by the circumstances. After all, one in three customers report that their most serious product or service problem precipitated emotional distress.

And that’s just one case. Hurling objects, personal threats, full-on attacks, and other extreme behaviors brought on by addiction or acute distress are only a sampling of some of the disruptive and distressing crisis-driven incidents that frontline service staff may confront. The US Bureau of Labor & Statistics reports that about two million Americans are victims of workplace violence annually. Customers are reported to be the primary perpetrators of such victimization, accounting for 40% of these incidents. Owing to our investigation of customer rage, we also know that—under the right circumstances—the customer experience milieu can be a lightning rod for public outbursts that may escalate into crisis-driven events.

Crisis-driven incidents, when enacted in these spaces, have effects on par with (or greater than) other, more traditionally recognized forms of conflict. They fundamentally challenge the marketplace’s ability to provide safety, order, and predictability, and require the negotiation of competing interests and needs (individual vs. collective, care vs. containment, inclusion vs. exclusion). Thus, they fit both the spirit and operational reality of marketplace conflict, even if their origins are not always intentional or adversarial.

Given this reality—and the paucity of empirical data about the occurrence and phenomenology of crisis-driven incidents in the realm of the day-to-day customer experience—there is clearly a need for future research to advance deeper insights into these events as a form of marketplace conflict.

Marketplace Conflict – Economic Class Warfare As A Form Of Conflict & Disruption

Every time I visit a CVS or Walgreens nowadays, many of the everyday items we use which were previously on open shelfing are now under the protection of lock and key. One way to read this rather sudden change in company policy is to see it a corporate countermeasure to an uprising of the economically disadvantaged. It is a testimony to the fact that marketplace conflict needn’t reveal itself in the overt sorts of “hand-to-hand customer experience combat” such as screaming, cursing, boycotts and public protests. Rather it more closely resembles economic class warfare, perhaps tied to increasing income inequality and relative deprivation.

The societal consequences of income inequality and the feeling of relative deprivation (that overwhelming perception of feeling left behind) are well documented: higher violent crime rates, greater economic instability and political inequality, just to name a few.

While less is known about how such economic inequities and the resulting economic class warfare show up and in and disrupt everyday business, one might persuasively argue that these economic disparities only serve to exacerbate customer fury and reshape consumer behavior through assorted psychological, economic and social pathways. For instance, some studies contend that relative deprivation can fuel a frustration toward business that leads to verbal abuse, hostile complaints and vandalism. Is it any surprise that high-inequality geographies see 40% higher shoplifting and vandalism? And business, perhaps, responds in kind. Retailers report a 93% increase in shoplifting since 2019, 71% of retailers have increased their budget for AI surveillance systems and security guard hires in urban stores shot up 45%.

I don’t know about you, but to me this resembles an emerging form of economic class warfare, a new variant of marketplace conflict.

Looking Ahead: Rethinking Hostilities in the Marketplace

The 1976 White House study warned that poor complaint handling could dent profits. Our 2025 update calculates the stakes of lousy complaint handling at $596 billion in revenue risk—a figure that would’ve made even the most stoic ’70s bureaucrat sweat through their polyester suit.

However, as you digest the findings from this 11th National Customer Rage survey, I urge you to go beyond the theoretical bottom-line consequences and consider them through the lens of our practical and compounding societal complexities: a record number of product and service problems fueled by technologies and ever-increasing consumption, inflationary pressures turning small fees into flashpoints, generative and often clumsy AI scaling corporate complaint handling, and a generation raised on “call-out culture” now wielding it against retailers.

This is no longer just a customer experience challenge. The insights from this important inquiry also represent a societal stress test. Future inroads to understanding and responding to marketplace conflict may require rethinking and evolving a more sophisticated rendering of hostilities—one that better recognizes the varying root causes of friction between businesses and their consumers. The evolution of a more nuanced framework that distinguishes between transactional customer rage, the uncivilities of conscientious consumers, outbursts brought about by crises, and the cat and mouse game of economic grievances can, we hope, help us to chart a path toward genuine empathy, effective problem resolution, and a less combative marketplace.

The post Reflections On The 2025 National Customer Rage Survey first appeared on Customer Care Measurement & Consulting.

What Unhappy Customers Want

wpsupport — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:39:58 +0000

By: Marc Grainer, Charles H. Noble, Mary Jo Bitner and Scott M. Broetzmann

Companies have tried for decades to improve customer complaint resolution — without notable success. A new approach is needed.

In 1976, the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs sponsored what many consider the first national survey of customer satisfaction in the United States, asking consumers what problems they had experienced with products and services during the past year and profiling the resulting complaining behavior of those customers. That study found that the expectations of many customers were not being met. Products people wanted were frequently out of stock, quality was often shoddy, and repairs and customer support were often poor. In the nearly 40 years since the original study, companies of every size and shape have identified customer service as an area of tremendous importance for customer retention and branding. In fact, in the minds of many managers, the ability to ratchet up customer service has become an essential element of competitiveness.

Given the amount of attention companies have since paid to improving customer service, they might expect to have seen dramatic gains in the level of customer satisfaction. However, based on the 2013 National Customer Rage (hereafter, Customer Rage) survey,2 which followed the basic methodology of the original U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs survey, complainant satisfaction is lower today than in 1976. Although companies have invested in technology, call centers and other resources (such as staff training) to provide better customer service, many businesses are finding that being able to create satisfied and loyal customers is more difficult today. Hurdles include a daunting rise in customer expectations; challenges posed by the Internet, social media and online word of mouth; and poor execution of upgraded corporate complaint-handling policies.

Since the 1970s, we have been involved in researching changes in customer satisfaction, and in the past decade we have conducted six Customer Rage surveys in the United States as well as variations of this study internationally. (See “About the Research.”) Among the most interesting findings:

The explosion of online social networking and other communication tools has raised the stakes drastically in the area of customer satisfaction. While disgruntled customers in the 1970s may have expressed their dissatisfaction to 10 friends and family, our 2011 Customer Rage survey found that modern, socially connected consumers reach an average of 280 others each time they post on social networking sites, with the potential for echo effects through “retweeting” and other viral activity on sites such as YouTube.
When today’s customers get mad, they often tend to get really mad. In our 2013 U.S. survey, 68% of the respondents who had experienced customer problems during the past year were either “extremely” or “very upset.” Thirty-six percent said they had “yelled or raised (their) voice” in connection with their most serious customer problem.
In addressing complaints, companies are failing in their efforts to create one-stop resolution with technology and people dedicated to resolving customer problems. In 2013, only 21% of complaining customers said they felt that their problems were resolved at the first point of contact; customers reported that they typically needed to make four or more company contacts before achieving a resolution.

Clearly, customer satisfaction remains a major concern. In fact, the share of customers reporting problems has grown. While 32% of consumers reported experiencing a problem with products or services during the past year in 1976, that figure rose to 50% in 2013. So what can companies do to improve the level of customer satisfaction in complaining situations?

FOR MORE INFORMATION

To read further or comment on this article please visit http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/55313 or contact the authors at smrfeedback@mit.edu

AUTHORS:

Marc Grainer (Former Chairman, Customer Care Measurement & Consulting)
Charles H. Noble (Proffitt’s Professor of Marketing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville)
Mary Jo Bitner (Edward M. Carson Chair in Service Marketing and the executive director of the Center for Services Leadership at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University)
Scott M. Broetzmann (President and CEO of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting)

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How The Net Promoter Score (NPS) Is Like Global Warming

wpsupport — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 17:05:08 +0000

By John Goodman, Scott M. Broetzmann and Katie Haring

Adam Alter, Assistant Professor of Marketing & Psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, recently opined that global warming is a perfect storm of “threat-by-stealth”. He notes that, despite the overwhelming agreement among experts that humans contribute to global warming and its apocalyptic impact, it very often remains a “political afterthought.” Summarizing his theory about the psychology of ignoring such a super-threat, Alter suggests that global warming’s “murky consequences aren’t vivid enough to impress our distracted brains.” And so it is with many omnibus corporate customer experience metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Simple Is Usually Not Actionable

These oversimplified measures are all too often failing to embolden leadership to act on the impending doom and disaster that accompanies a mediocre customer experience.

Many companies have been quick to adopt NPS and similar global indices describing the customer experience. Such “overall” measures are alluring in the C-suite. A single number or index is uncomplicated to calculate, easy to understand and simple to promote in and outside of the organization. They nicely fit into the strategic dashboards that are now popular. It’s no wonder that leadership has been quick to pull the trigger on embracing a single score-mentality. However, in many of these same companies, the executive group has been less likely to rally around NPS and aggressively support serious investment in an enhanced customer experience.

Why the disconnect? Perhaps a primary reason that NPS often fails to precipitate action is found in the psychological principles operative in the global warming phenomenon; that is, maybe NPS and similar overall metrics induce more a state of complacency than a sense of urgency. For example:

NPS as an indicator may be too general to capture the attention and imagination of the organization. As the average temperature of the ocean or CO2 levels are to global warming so may NPS be to the customer experience. It may well be a leading indicator of impending malaise, but it’s not close enough “to home” and probably doesn’t apply to a particular executive’s “neighborhood” or function.
NPS may not promote accountability because it’s not tied to specific phases of the customer lifecycle or individual functional areas of the organization. So, as there are many factors and processes that contribute to global warming, likewise there are multiple sources of customer dissatisfaction and disloyalty. Action follows from ownership which stems from more proper and precise diagnosis of causes. In the absence of further reliable diagnostic data about the customer experience, NPS permits a leader to “rationalize” that his or her functional area’s contribution to the overall problem is small. Further, NPS damage is seldom tied to particular phases of the customer experience.
NPS doesn’t create an economic call to action that is credible to Finance and Marketing. While omnibus metrics do play a role in diagnosing opportunities to improve the customer experience, they are often insufficient. We have observed many instances where quantifying revenue damage and negative word of mouth is a catalyst for corporate action. This is a fundamental limitation of NPS which can be only generally tied to loyalty and has seldom been converted into quantified estimates of customers lost, revenue at risk per month or number of cases of negative word of mouth caused by poor customer experiences

A Complementary Approach That Fosters Action

Addressing these fatal flaws of an orthodox NPS approach is simple but not easy. We advocate that any use of NPS be supplemented by the use of three corrective “measures.” In our experience, these complementary metrics and processes are powerful techniques for helping any organization overcome the “hypnotic trance” that the use of NPS alone can typically induce. The three compensatory analytical techniques include:

A proper key driver and sensitivity analysis
The Market Damage model
A commitment to formal action planning

A Proper Key Driver & Sensitivity Analysis. When executed properly, key driver analysis (the methodology for identifying what matters most) is central to getting executive attention. Done correctly, it calls attention to what is to be gained from effective action and thereby ensures the proper allocation of finite resources for improving the customer experience.

Despite great advances in sophisticated analytical tools, we see many key driver analyses as methodologically flawed. For example, they rely on a measure of “stated importance” (i.e., what the customer self-reports as “important”), the “squeaky wheel” method (i.e., areas of lowest satisfaction) or simple correlation analysis (i.e., one-by-one association of a set of customer experience measures with overall satisfaction or loyalty).

Our experience suggests that a more effective methodology for key driver analysis entails using multivariate techniques (e.g., factor analysis coupled with multiple regression) that permit the researcher to restate key driver outcomes in the language of executives. Executives care less about “what’s important” and care more about an understanding of what can be learned by effectively acting on things that matter. In our own practice, we prefer the use of a simple key driver sensitivity analysis. For each attribute measured (i.e., each element of the customer experience measured), we ask and answer one simple question: What is gained in overall satisfaction or loyalty from a 5 percent point increase in satisfaction for the individual driver?

As well, assuming that you have sufficient data to do so, you may also consider doing two key driver analyses: one for customers reporting “no problems” and a second for customers who have had a recent problem. Often, this analysis will yield additional detail about the nuance of the key drivers. Customers’ emphasis on service dimensions becomes significantly stronger once they encounter a serious problem.

The Market Damage Model (MDM). Over the past four decades, we have frequently used the MDM to address a primary shortcoming of traditional customer experience measurement: it’s long on directional data but short on specifying the bottom-line consequences of inaction.

Using both customer experience survey data and company financial data as inputs, the output of the MDM is a dollar-value estimate of the revenue (or profits) at risk resulting from a “less-than-perfect” customer experience. The MDM effectively offsets each of the three weaknesses of an NPS-only approach. Specifically, the MDM:

Identifies specific problems in each phase of the customer experience that cause damage. Using the global warming analogy, as an extended drought or rising of tides represents specific causes of pain and cost that capture attention, so too will quantifying the specific number of customers encountering a particular problem.
Facilitates the identification of the cause of problems and accountability for action. Customer problems do not occur in the abstract; they are encountered at specific times and caused by specific processes and functions which can be noted, reported and fixed. The MDM can be tied to problem occurrence, complaint behavior and problem resolution; all of which can be easily measured and are conceptually simple to grasp.
Quantifies the revenue and word of mouth damage of the overall level of problems (think temperature or CO2 increases in the global warming analogy) and of each individual problem in a manner that is credible to Finance and Marketing . This translation of simple descriptive data to a business case rooted in financials creates a credible call to action and supports a more rational decision-making protocol for allocating resources and calculating ROIs.

A Commitment To Formal Action Planning. As part of our own continuous improvement effort, we field a client satisfaction survey following every engagement. Our questionnaire includes all of the usual suspects, such as a set of satisfaction attributes related to the client’s experience with the various aspects of the engagement, overall satisfaction, and a gauge of the intention to recommend. However, the most important question we ask is, “Have you taken tangible action to improve the customer experience based on the work that we’ve co-produced?”

More than 90 percent of CCMC clients report that they are using the results of CCMC surveys to take actions to enhance the customer experience. Taking action on survey results is more the exception in the general marketplace. Even among companies that tick all of the technical best practices boxes for increasing survey impact, many still fail in their attempt to positively influence the customer experience because they have no process in place to connect the dots between the survey findings and operational accountability. Intentionally operationalizing meaningful changes in business practices is a compulsory event that we refer to as action planning.

Assuming that the ultimate goal of any survey is to contribute to a positive, incremental and sustainable improvement in the customer experience, action planning is the magic elixir to bring about this outcome. It is the antidote to complacency.

As we define it, action planning is the intentional and ongoing process of identifying, operationalizing, and implementing specific actions that affect enough customers, over a long enough period of time, to increase positive ratings for those selected elements of the customer experience that yield the greatest payoff.

Tactically, action planning consists of a formal, face-to-face gathering of a crossfunctional group of key stakeholders (as few as 8 and as many as 50) engaged in a daylong facilitated session focused on three to five priorities for action that have been identified by the survey. Strategically, action planning is an ideation effort; it is the connective tissue between the survey findings/recommendations and the change in organizational behaviors. The various methodologies for implementing this facilitated event are plentiful (e.g., brainstorming techniques, visualization practices, etc.).

Regardless of the methodologies used, the critical point is to ensure that an action planning effort is in place. We have found that action planning dramatically increases the ROI that companies can earn for their survey investments by ensuring that they focus finite resources on and act on what matters most to customers. When compared against those who do not implement a formal action planning process, companies that engage in formal action planning are significantly more likely to achieve sustainable increases in customer satisfaction and loyalty, achieve those notable gains more quickly and at a lower cost, and ensure that the survey results are integrated into the culture of the organization.

Defeating NPS Groupthink

It would not be difficult to argue that NPS and related omnibus metrics have helped propagate a certain customer experience groupthink. The “magic” of NPS has fostered the evolution of a virtual and overly cohesive group of corporate decision makers which believes itself to be infallible or invincible when it comes to the customer experience. In many cases, nothing could be further from the truth. In such cases, it’s more likely that no one is paying attention to signs of impending customer doom because they lack the right data and processes.

The key to preventing the oft negative outcomes associated with NPS is to use it in conjunction with three companion tools: quantification of the market damage of inaction, a proper key driver and sensitivity analysis and a formal action planning process.

Scott Broetzmann is President and CEO of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, scott@customercaremc.com.

John Goodman is Vice Chairman of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, jgoodman@customercaremc.com

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Searching For A Clearer Voice

wpsupport — Sat, 01 Aug 2015 22:08:59 +0000

Updating the definition of the voice of the customer

By John Goodman, David Beinhacker, Scott M. Broetzmann

Editor’s note: John Goodman is vice chairman, David Beinhacker is director of research and Scott Broetzmann is president and CEO, at Customer Care Measurement and Consulting, an Alexandria, Va., firm.

The term voice of the customer (VOC) has traditionally been interpreted as being analogous with or part of the domain of marketing research (MR). With the advent of customer experience (CX) and enterprise feedback management technology (EFM), many companies are rethinking VOC, often assigning it to a department other than MR. This battle was most starkly highlighted by a headline on the cover of the November 2014 Quirk’s, “Is CX out to get MR?” Now that EFM has become primarily a technology play, even more departments like the information technology department are becoming involved.

Our conclusion is that CX will most likely end up owning VOC and that MR is facing a diminished role, especially since leading companies have been wildly successful using their CX to drive customer acquisition via word of mouth. Companies like Chick-fil-A, USAA and Harley-Davidson have indicated that they obtain 70 percent or more of their new customers via word-of-mouth referrals, so there really is not much need for either MR or even traditional marketing. But there is a need to rethink the definition of VOC, which we do below.

Gerry Katz states in his December 2013 Quirk’s article that some analysts have hijacked the term voice of the customer by completely misusing it.¹ McInnes and Carroll introduce enterprise feedback management and define it primarily as surveys, complaints and social media inputs.² In an article published the April 2014 Quirk’s, Subbiah and Bosik further complicate the discussion by noting that the hype about big data and EFM is reaching a frenzy.³The Temkin Group, in both white papers and Webinars, has suggested that text analytics and continuous insights are the key to enhanced VOC impact.⁴ Finally, Whipkey suggests that CX could completely take over MR.⁵ We now have three terms: VOC, MR and EFM. Are they the same or, if not, how do they differ? Our conclusion is that they: are different; draw on different data sources; and serve different internal customers.

Katz’s criticisms of VOC provide a good starting place. He notes that VOC often does not support radical innovation and fails to facilitate marketing conquests. However, while criticizing the overlapping use of the terms VOC and MR, he never directly states that VOC is not MR.

We believe that they are two different animals. VOC describes the experience of existing customers while MR is primarily aimed at developing the best product and strategy to tap the rest of the market by gaining new customers, usually called marketing conquests. VOC can be used to not only improve future CE but, if properly defined, can be used real-time to enhance current CE. Further, Katz’s analysis limits the sources of data that describe the experience of current customers as well the analysis and use of such data.

We briefly review his critique and then suggest, based on how technology has evolved in the past two years, how VOC must be redefined in much broader terms if it is to achieve its full potential.

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Stop The Annual Do You Love Us Survey – 16 Tactical Best Practices For Survey Execution

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 19:30:07 +0000

In an article published by Customer Think, author John Goodman explains the key differentiators between companies that move the needle following investments in customer surveys and those companies that do not.

John also provides a framework for the various types of customer surveys to allow clear understanding of focus and purpose, identifies which ones are relevant to the customer feedback process, how to create a baseline, and how to track progress, who should be part of the survey team, and much more.

Learn how to get executive buy-in to KPIs and to keep the same objective for at least six years. Turning data into an action plan where performance accountability is assigned to staff is essential for progress.

Sixteen best practices for survey execution will ensure you field surveys and deliver an impactful product like a seasoned professional.

In reading the article, it becomes clear that simple surveys that offer scores are largely a waste of time, and that poorly engineered and executed surveys turn off employees who wind up discounting the data and estrange customers who conclude your business does not value them or their time.

On the other hand, a well-conceived and actionable survey on which changes are made generates surprisingly positive feedback from customers.

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The C-Suite

wpsupport — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:08:21 +0000

By: Scott M. Broetzmann

The customer experience • def: a customer journey which makes the customer feel happy, satisfied, justified, with a sense of being respected, served and cared for, according to his/ her expectation or standard, starting from first contact and through the whole relationship. Some have suggested that the customer experience is the single most important aspect in achieving success for companies across all industries. And the C-suite is devoted to improving the customer experience. Or is it? Consider the following examples:

In pursuit of a better customer experience, an European food and beverage company decides to “in-source” its toll free customer care center, which it has outsourced for many years. The task force created to manage this transition establishes three goals: (1) improve service quality and increase customer satisfaction; (2) lower costs; and, (3) expand and enhance the service.

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More Seeking Revenge

wpsupport — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:31:09 +0000

As Customer Problems Hit a Record High, More People Seek ‘Revenge’

Latest edition of a long-running survey finds that the share of customers who say they had a service or product problem has doubled since the 1970s

Americans are encountering more problems with companies’ products and services than ever before, and a higher proportion of them are actively seeking “revenge” for their troubles, a new study has found.

Some 74% of the 1,000 consumers surveyed said they had experienced a product or service problem in the past year. That is up from 66% in 2020, when the study last was conducted, and 56% in 2017. Only 32% told researchers they had experienced a problem in 1976, when a similar version of the study was first conducted.

The percentage of consumers who have taken action to settle a score against a company through measures such as pestering or public shaming in person or online, has tripled to 9% from 3% in 2020, according to the study. That reversed a downward trend with regards to revenge-seeking behavior: The average percentage of customers seeking revenge between 2003 and 2017 was 17%.

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In B2B Environments, No News Is Not Good News

admin — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 18:28:00 +0000

By David Beinhacker, John Goodman

In B2B environments, no news is often NOT good news. With business customers complaining at an even lower rate than consumers, John Goodman, Vice Chairman of CCMC, and David Beinhacker, CCMC’s Chief Research Officer and Partner, explain in this article published by Quirks the reasons for the lower complaint rate, the lost opportunity and how companies can tackle this very important issue and improve their bottom line.

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OK Is Not Great

wpsupport — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:15:47 +0000

By: John Goodman and Kathleen Kerr

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) can be a dangerous tool. Implicitly ignoring “passives” – those offering a “7” or and “8” on a 10-point scale– the NPS disregards a large segment of the market that is less loyal, more likely to spread negative word of mouth, and more responsive to “cheap delighters” that can enhance loyalty and positive word of mouth.

The post OK Is Not Great first appeared on Customer Care Measurement & Consulting.

Little Things Mean A Lot

wpsupport — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:27:26 +0000

By: John Goodman, Sally Hurley, Thomas Hollmann and Scott M. Broetzmann

Researchers have correctly focused the bulk of customer experience (CX) measurement resources on the dissatisfied end of the continuum. John Goodman and Marc Grainer of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting’s (CCMC) team led the original White House-sponsored research in the 1974-1984 time frame on complaint-handling.1,2 Business Week noted that, “Sparked by some landmark studies commissioned by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs….a new attitude has been born….” Our models included quantification of the payoff of improved loyalty and for winning new customers via word of mouth (WOM) using broad, conservative assumptions. B. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, in their book “Experience Economy,” initiated scrutiny of the other end of the spectrum: delight. They tell of the Nordstrom store where a woman demands and is given a refund for tires not bought at Nordstrom (she bought them at a tire store that used to be at that location). Finance executives suggest that a refund in that case was inappropriate.

The post Little Things Mean A Lot first appeared on Customer Care Measurement & Consulting.