In an economic climate where disposable income is shrinking, positive customer service is perhaps one of the most important competitive strengths that a company can have. The 2009 Customer Experience Maturity Monitor survey from Peppers & Rogers Group, found that “81% of companies with strong capabilities and competencies for delivering customer experience excellence are outperforming their competition.” Added to this, it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one and the White House Office of Consumers Affairs, found that a dissatisfied consumer will tell between 9 and 15 people about their experience. Conversely, happy customers who get their complaints resolved tell about 4 to 6 people about their positive experience.

It is for these reasons that most companies undertake customer feedback surveys and these become benchmarks for judging performance of various teams responsible for customer facing operations. The desired trend for customer complaints is obviously one that slopes downwards. Perhaps due to this, management often relies on creating frameworks which help reduce complaints by quicker resolutions. The big problem with this? It can be entirely the wrong metric.

If you make it very easy for your customers to make a complaint and your demographic is technology savvy, then it might be the right metric as you will be making it easy for the majority of your consumers to provide feedback. However, if you are not blessed with such a demographic, then by in large, most of your consumers will simply fail to make a formal complaint. A fascinating statistic from Lee Resource Inc, found that for every customer complaint, there are 26 customers who stay silent.

What happens when most of your customers don’t provide any feedback?

Are they simply ignored from the customer complaint metrics, from your product resolution and from your innovation processes? What if there are complaints identifying problems which have never been identified before? Surely, the smarter strategy would be to try to find a way that invites more feedback from a wider demographic of your consumer and capture this crucial wider data?

Identifying how the majority of your demographic behave becomes the most important foundation point for any customer management system in this case. Should they be able to provide feedback by email, phone, VOIP, text, in person or even directly via the product? The answer will vary. Start of by answering this side of the equation and then on the other side, work out how these answers can best be turned into results by your management team. How do your management and employees best communicate and work? Both sides of the equation need to match up for results to be seen.

You can go beyond this too. It is prudent to also program in non-complaint metrics into your customer management system. For example, how many customers have you not heard from in x amount time, how many are not updating their products through discounted upgrades or how many are referring new customers to you (this requires a trackable referral scheme to be put in place) compared to a selected period of time?

Vitally, reward customers who provide feedback and reward employees who resolve complaints. Both sides of the coin are important, if you are to maximise the amount of valuable data that is being fed back to your management teams. Zappos is a great example of a company (bought by Amazon.com because of it’s phenomenal culture and growth), who does both really well.

Here are some facts of how they capture the silent majority:

1) They encourage customers to order products to just try them on and offer free shipping on returns for an incredible 365 days from purchase. This might seem unsustainable but the reality is that once the standard 21 day return period is over, dissatisfied customers will rarely provide feedback and then they’re potentially lost. A full 365 days not only makes it likely for customers to make more purchases but also increases the chance of receiving feedback by making the feedback window easy and longer.

2) Customers are encouraged to call whenever they want. The call center receives 5,000 calls per day and staff are not constrained by scripts or quotas. Again a positive experience created from a potentially negative experience. By making it easy to make the calls and be heard by someone who does not pass you on from department to department, Zappos claims to be able to speak to all their customers at least once.

Phenomenal grasp of customer relationship management like this, is exactly what companies need to invest in. Within the company, the CEO, Tony Hsieh motivates employees to deliver ‘wow through service’ as the core value of the company and this combined effort, creates happiness. Have a look at their other core values and you can understand why Zappos is such a high growth company.

So take a look at your customer base and ask ‘Are we ignoring the silent majority?’ and find the best way of reaching out them…