50% of people with complaints quietly quit
Despite half of consumers (50%) being frustrated by the experiences they receive when shopping online, 43% say they will never share any feedback. That’s according to a new research report from FullStory.
The Quiet Critics report, based on a survey of 7,000 shoppers, also found that two-thirds (65%) will simply abandon a website or app when confronted with a digital frustration — and only 16% are “very likely” to give a brand a second chance if it has failed them.
This influential group of dissatisfied but silent customers — known as “quiet critics” — mirrors the workplace trend of “quiet quitting”. In this phenomenon, disgruntled or ambivalent employees do not inform their bosses of their dissatisfaction, instead doing the bare minimum work required to not get fired.
Why don’t people complain?
Consumers often lack the confidence to complain. They worry what will happen if they complain. Will they be banned? Will they be told they are wrong? Will they feel worse? Will they get a staff member into trouble? These things are rarely true, but it is a fear of the unknown or basing their belief on a previous bad experience.
The findings highlight the importance of flawless first-time consumer experiences, while also demonstrating the incompleteness of traditional customer feedback mechanisms.
Consumers also tell me that they don’t fill out feedback forms, such as Peter, who says ‘The offered options don’t match my experience or what I want to say’. Others feel it will be used to penalise staff. It’s certainly the case that an engineer might come to your home and mend your broadband but the survey asking about satisfaction with the engineer can ask ‘would you recommend the company?’ and the answer may be “no” due to all the previous correspondence or time taken to get an engineer.
That feedback could reflect unfairly on the engineer and people are becoming more wise to this.
How businesses get feedback
Businesses across all industries have spent millions in recent years to elicit feedback through customer surveys, reviews and ‘Voice of the Customer’ programmes, but these fail to capture the opinions of millions of introverted consumers who abandon websites and apps without saying anything.
Businesses need to get better in how they acquire honest feedback by doing more to build trust.
If a company only allows positive reviews, it’s not believable because it is simply unrealistic, which backfires on a company because consumers will trust them less. They need to use a wide variety of methods to gain the feedback for a detailed and truer picture. Companies need to incentivise customers to provide feedback. After all, feedback can be used to improve products and service and therefore increase sales, so it’s free consultancy from the people who matter most for sales, the customers.
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