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Fuzzy Logic Consumers spurn company ‘churn and burn’
Fuzzy Logic Consumers spurn company ‘churn and burn’ | Consumers spurn company ‘churn and burn’ |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Wednesday, 30 April 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 The unsurprising research comes from RightNow Technologies and StollzNow Research, which showed that only half of the companies that had dimly figured out they’d lost customer loyalty had bothered to try and win the customer back! The research is recent, which is always great to see, coming from 1031 research participants in Australia and New Zealand interviewed during March 2008. RightNow says the companies that participants were asked about were in the “telecommunications, utilities, insurance, online retail, internet service provider (ISP), travel and hospitality, and finance industries”. One even more unsurprising finding from the research was that “the report's findings are proof that the impact of a poor customer experience can directly affect a company's bottom line”. It’s a shame some companies will only wake up to this because of this report, but then I guess I don’t hold out much hope of already useless companies learning anything more than how to further rip off their shrinking customer bases just to prop up earnings. Apparently “customer acquisition relative to customer retention” has a high cost – as if this wasn’t already evident to everyone but the categories of companies asked about. Yet again, it was unsurprising to discover that those companies were prepared to wear a level of “customer churn”. What a waste! Confirming the dreadfully horrific trend towards poor customer service in Australia and New Zealand, two thirds of the participants said they had experienced poor customer service from one of the seven different categories of companies listed above. The biggest non-surprise of all is that telecommunications companies were at the very top of the abysmally poor customer service list with 62% of customers unhappy, in what is the anti-gold medal. Then came ISPs, which are often - but not always - owned by telecommunications companies anyway, at 52%. Silver. Ugh. So, who won the bronze medal, and what did consumers have to say about the inexplicably poor treatment given to them by companies that clearly should know better – and are only in business because of the very people that suffer from the customer handling ineptitude? Please read onto page 2. |
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