Poor Customer Service Results In Feelings Of Anger And Betrayal

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Brands need to boost customer service initiatives to keep customers happy and returning.

In a new study by customer experience analytics platform InMoment, customers around the world were nearly twice as likely as brands to say they associate anger with bad experiences, indicating feelings of betrayal if a brand fails to meet their basic needs. Simply put, when brands can’t deliver on even the most basic of promises, they risk turning away even the most loyal customers.

That means that retailers need to boost their customer service initiatives to keep their customers happy and coming back for more. According to Forrester, emotion is now the No. 1 driver of a great customer experience — outpacing ease and effectiveness, and Temkin Group, an analyst firm specializing in customer experience, declared 2016 “the Year of Emotion.”

The 2017 CX Trends Report sought to gain a more detailed understanding of which emotions consumers associate with positive and negative brand experiences, as well as the emotions they associate with the brands toward which they feel the most loyal. The findings indicate that brands may overestimate what consumers need to feel they’ve had a positive experience, which also greatly underestimating the depth of consumer displeasure that accompanies negative experiences.

The survey polled 10,000 brands and 20,000 consumers worldwide regarding their customer experience (CX).  Some notable findings from the report include:

• 38 percent of consumers associated the emotion “satisfaction” with positive brand experiences, while 40 percent used it to describe their experiences with brands to which they are loyal.
• In Germany, nearly 40 percent of respondents chose “anger” when describing a poor customer experience, which is significantly higher than all other countries.
• Europe in general reported higher levels of anger than the rest of the world when describing a bad customer experience.
• When asked what feelings are associated with a poor customer experience, “disrespect” ranked low among brands worldwide, despite consumers in some countries choosing this as their top emotion.

Consumers also ranked personalized support as their first priority, while brands underestimated the importance of personalization during the purchase process by about five percentage points.

The study concludes, “The desire to create positive emotional connections are aided by creating meaningful, personalized interactions. Consumers want you to understand who they are and what they value across all types of interactions. Our recommendation is to ensure this one-to-one feeling permeates every aspect of your consumers’ journey with your brand. This includes the technology used to empower the collection of feedback and the manner in which you recognize and respond to the feedback consumers provide.”

“The discipline of CX has quickly matured into a sophisticated lever for accelerating business performance. Today’s consumers want more human interactions with brands. Organizations everywhere have the opportunity to leverage this valuable understanding to reach new heights and own, if not redefine, their competitive market position.”