Since I haven’t had enough time to reed my feeds and to post here as frequently as I would like to, I am way behind. Therefore, a little late comment on Rons (from Buzzoodle) post on The Annoyance Factor from June 1st. I’ve written in english so that Ron too should be able to follow it, for once! ;-)

The annoyance factor is the % of people that are less than happy with your product or service but not so unhappy as to complain.

Complaining is good. When you get a complaint, if you are smart, you address the issue, fix the problem and make that complainer into a fan again.

So true! It might be that you are in an industry where the standard product/service doesn’t provide anything “extra” as it it now. Nothing to be really satisfied with, nothing to mention to a friend, nothing to remark about. What happens when a new player enters the market, with a slightly better product or service that does provide something extra, that gives satisfaction, and that gives something to remark about? You’re out of business, if you don’t respond quickly!

So, how can you use the fact that a lot of your customers are part of the “not so happy”-crowd? First of all, using customer service to pick up the clients’ experienced negative issues and complaints is a good start, but this is only re-active. You should try to be pro-active. You have to reach out to the ones that do not call customer service. You have to find out also why they are not delighted by your product/service, and you have to find out how you could improve. Basically, you have to try to raise the bar! Questions like:

  • How do you like our product/service?
  • What is wrong with our product/service?

… will only take you that far.

To get honest replies, to be able to really take advantage of the feedback from the “not so happy”-crowd and to get ahead of the competition, you have to ask something more like:

  • We know our product/service isn´t perfect – if you had the chance to get what you wished for, what other benefits would you want from it
  • If you could change anything you wanted with our product/service, what would it be?
  • What would your dream product/service in this category look like and what would it do for you?

There are more questions that could be asked, but these are some suggestions. You shouldn’t leave the door open to answer something like “Ok, I guess” or “I think it’s fine”. That doesn’t give you anything to work with. Try to force a real answer you can use. Try to get the client to dream a bit.

To finish off, just one more quote from Rons post on Buzzoodle.

The more you can move people up to happy and out of the annoyance realm, the more successful your organization will be.

P.S. Even though it’s against my principles, comments are temporarily not allowed due to the heavy comment spamming for all kinds of pharmaceuticals that has been taking place. I will try to update my WordPress version when I get time since I heard it’s better at filtering out spam. Until then, you are more than welcome to comment via e-mail. D.S.