We tend to think all is well with the world when no one complains.
Yet, most customers rarely complain. Instead, they just walk out of the door, without saying a word. A silent customer is not necessarily an asset.
How can you get your customer to be a little more ‘noisy'—and why you should start now.
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Re-release: Why You Should Never Trust A Silent Customer
Original: Why You Should Never Trust A Silent Customer
Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
And because this podcast is called the three month vacation, and because we tend to travel quite a bit, people often ask us one question which is which is your favorite place on the planet.
What they don't ask me is which is your favorite article which is fair enough. It's more interesting to listen to which is your favorite place on the planet than which is your favorite article but since you're listening I might as well tell you anyway.
I started writing articles around the year 2000.
At first we'd send out the article every 15 days and then every seven days and now the newsletter goes out twice a week. But one of my favorite articles is called Never Trust the Silent Customer.
In New Zealand where we live, you find that people don't tend to complain that much. Even if they get bad service, even if the food is not so good, even if the coffee's burned, they tend not to complain.
And that kind of customer is a really nice one, a very polite one, but you don't want to trust them. You trust the customer that complains and that gives you feedback and it sounds really odd, but hear me out.
Think about the psychology of complaining about something.
It's not just a wine, it's because you care about enough to want to come back. If you're never going to go back to the cafe, never visit the restaurant again. Never want to do a course ever again with that company.
Then what's the point of complaining. I mean sure you can get your money back if there's some kind of guarantee like that. But most of the time we are complaining when we are on home ground because at some level we have chosen the cafe, we've chosen that restaurant.
We've chosen that course, we've chosen that supplier. And again, it doesn't sound like much, but we made a contract. When we bought something from somebody else, we made a contract.
We've given you money in good faith. You've given us something in good faith. And that contract must be honored. We know the money part works because the money still works, but how do we know that we have delivered the goods.
How do we know that the client is happy?
We don't. There is no way to find out except to ask for feedback and to ask for feedback repeatedly. If you don't get feedback, there is no way to fix things. For instance, we've been doing courses on psychotactics since almost 2005.
So we've done quite a lot of courses and hundreds of people have been through those courses. They love it and we know that they love it because they keep coming back.
These are not cheap courses. Some of them are $2,000, some are $3,500, the clients keep coming back. What happens at the end of the course is people are expected to write anywhere between 500 to 800 words on what was wrong with the course, what was wrong with the system, what was wrong with all of the things that that they found could be improved.
Now when you look at the person that's writing that feedback, the first thing is that they don't want to do it. This is an assignment that they've been given and they don't want to do it.
The second thing that you realize is that when they write it, they don't feel like they're complaining and they are not. They want to come back and this is the crux of everything that if you don't get a client back, then you've failed on the most basic elements of business.
When people say, “I want to sell this product.” Yes, the first sale pretty much anybody can make. It's not always easy, but you can do it. It's when you get the client back.
That is the most crucial part of a business for somebody to come back.
And by the time they come back, the third time, what they're doing is they're sitting in a specific spot, they're showing a preference pretty much like you and I go to a restaurant and we have our table or we go to a cafe and we have our spot.
People tend to have a preference when they visit it place the second time but definitely the third time. And there will be no second time or third time unless we get the feedback and that is only one part of the sequence.
The second part is the recovery.
Way back in 2006 we had a Year long course called the Prudeget and we used to meet up in Campbell, California. On the last day of the course which had been for almost five days, I asked the group to write down and then elaborate on the things that are gone wrong.
And of course, they were reluctant, but they did it. And then they started explaining their situation what they felt could be fixed. And as I sat in the corner of the room listening to them, the thought across my mind was, these people are so ungrateful.
I had put in so much effort and they're not being grateful.
I'm a different person now. In fact, there's a different person in a couple of years, so I'm then when I realized that they were trying to help me. They were not being silent customers.
Yes, I initiated it. I got the feedback. It was never going to be great. It was always going to find the holes. Nobody likes feedback. Everybody wants praise. Even when we say, we can take the feedback.
Even then, we don't take feedback well. Once we get the feedback, then it's a factor of recovery. What are we going to do next. Most people never do anything.
Often the client just wants to be heard and what we tend to do because we're in the business of teaching, we list out all the suggestions that have been made and then that goes on a to-do list. That's a public to-do list..
For the group, of course, but it's a public to-do list. Everybody can see it and everybody can benchmark whether we've done what we promised, and that gets the customer back.
Because they know that you're not just doing what you promised, but you've fixed the holds as well. And sometimes you can't fix the holds, sometimes the demand, as it were, is crazy, and you're just managing perception the next time, right.
But at least you know. And the one thing you can't do when people give you feedback is make excuses. Renuka and I went to separate Italian restaurants, probably separated by about a month.
The first time we had just the manager and the staff member complaining in front of us. So it made for a terrible experience. We've been going to the restaurant for several years in a row. We wrote to them, they apologized end of story.
But it didn't change our meal. We didn't get any recovery from it. We went to another Italian restaurant in the city. The waitress was hung over. We had to be served by three other staff members just to cope for this one person when we spoke to the manager who I know very well.
He said, “Well, you know, it's difficult to get stuff. This is what we stuck with.” And that's not recovery. That's not how you do stuff.
The two most crucial parts of a business are to get feedback and to recover from it and to recover from it with grace and to give the clients something so that they come back because that's what a business is all about.
It is relatively easy to get the first sale, much harder to get the second sale.
And by the time you've got the third sale, well they're coming back on a frequent basis. And you have to get them to give you feedback on a frequent basis.
And that's how you run a business. We can have feedback mechanisms on psychotactics. We ask for the bug of the month. We send a postcard. If the bug is really good, we send chocolate.
And if you pick up an e-book, then on every single page, there is an email me. And you can click on that. And you can send in your bugs stuff that you don't like.
Stuff that you'd like to change. People send in language translations, just little things, or they send in big chunks of stuff that need it to be fixed. And this makes the client come back.
And I don't know what else you could want from a business. Other than a client that's happy and comes back and complains at least part of the time. So if there's something that you don't like about this podcast or rather that you would fix in the podcast, then let me know.
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