More often than I would like to recall, I will talk with potential clients about their customers experience of their services or web site.
Often they will admit that their customer service or web experience is very poor.
Yet they will preface it all with – “but my customers aren’t going anywhere, they are clearly very loyal and don’t mind the current experience” – even if it is very bad, even abusive in parts.
What is happening here is very common. To often the rule of “its not broken – don’t fix it” comes into play.
From a business perspective too much time is being focused on doing the same things from the past; often the cause of the bad customer experience in the first place.
The continue backwards looking for solutions to the problems of today has been demonstrated in management circles to be very shortsighted, and yet people still do it. Still we hang onto the reactive approach, than the proactive.
Usually issues such as the customer experience are also taken as a “nice to have” over general sales and marketing process, being pushed aside, year aftr year when it comes to assigning the budget.
It’s fairly simple what will happen if the customer experience isn’t improved.
Over time people will drift away to try other like services, even if they are as bad.
If there is a new player or someone that has optimised their customer experience (even a little bit) then suddenly all those “loyal” customers will be jumping ship to the new site or service.
Often just a small changes can make a major difference in the behaviour of customers and their overall experience.
The question is – “is it worth it to ignore a bad customer experience?”
