Unhappy Customers Are Your Greatest Source of Customer Insights

5 mins

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Pallavi Pavithran

December 14, 2022

Frankly, there is only a thin line between customers’ happiness and unhappiness. If anything or a tiny fragment in their experience is not satisfactory or does not feel good for them personally, it will lead to a huge ‘unhappiness’ even though the rest of the experiences they felt are extraordinary!

But, the worst part about this is that they often won’t tell you if they are unhappy and why they are unhappy. They leave silently. In that case, there is less opportunity to find the core reasons behind the negative experiences you provide. Some customers interact, communicate or put a review about it to let the brand know what went wrong with the product or service. That’s a golden chance. You can go through the review and understand the reasons behind the issue to fix them as soon as possible.

Some brands depend on surveys like NPS or CSAT to check this ‘unhappiness’ and desperately end up with scores that can’t provide the complete picture. Sadly, some customers even choose a random score that is biased to their current mood or skip it and leave. So, what is the way to overcome these hurdles? How to understand the ‘unhappiness’ stuck in customers’ journey to make the experience more polished and smooth in the future. It's important to tackle unhappiness in customer experience to achieve long-term customer success.

How Do Unhappy Customers Share Their Unhappiness?

It’s pretty easy for customers to share and explain their happiness and unhappiness. And the difference here is happiness doesn’t give you many insights into the customer experience, but unhappiness does. How?

For example, if you ask a customer how the pancakes are, if they like it, they would say, “it’s really delicious,” and that’s it. You don’t get any insights from that, and you assume your customer is 100% happy and satisfied.

But, when an unhappy customer says, “the pancake was good, but the topping was not up to the mark,” He is a dissatisfied customer since he didn't get the desired outcomes from your brand, and you got the reason for his unhappiness. It gave you an insight that your topping is not good and you need to improve in that area.

You get this cue of customer dissatisfaction and can take further steps to get more insights into multiple customer segments and their preferences to make improvements that satisfy the existing customers and attract new customers.

Here, we are not saying we need dissatisfied customers to improve; instead, these customers wake you up from a static business process and open opportunities for improvements and technology updates if you use the insights properly.

Another way of expression for unhappy customers is the online platforms and social media, where they talk about products and services. There you can find the unhappy experience they shared very openly and the number of people agreeing with them according to the volume of engagement and comments.

Surveys like NPS or CSAT help to gather the overall unhappiness or dissatisfaction at some level, but they can’t provide insights on what needs to be fixed to make customers happy.

Higher NPS and CSAT scores would look fancy in the board meetings, but are they thought-provoking to take any action?

Moreover, we can get the NPS scores of any competitor and compare ours with theirs. Even if we get way more scores than the competitors, it doesn’t mean we are perfect and have captured the market. These surveys ask how they recommend your products; they can even think ‘may recommend’ and then just click score 8. So, a higher score doesn’t mean customers are happy and satisfied with a positive customer experience.

Hence, the best way to measure happiness is to ask customers for feedback, check their reviews, and direct conversations and get insights. They can be negative or positive feedback, but they are required to gain valuable insights for your company. Other sources, like customer survey scores, social media polls, etc., can be used as secondary sources to back your insights and findings.

How to Generate Customer Insights from Unhappy Customers?

A very straightforward and efficient way to capture feedback from an unhappy customer is by using a robust customer experience analytics tool.

With these tools, you can view all negative driving aspects of customer experience based on millions of customer reviews and interactions through multiple channels like CRM, live chat, etc., in an intuitive dashboard.

Suppose you have chosen a very sophisticated platform with drill-down options to a granular level. In that case, you will be able to figure out which product aspect caused customer unhappiness and how it impacted their customer journey within seconds.

Based on those insights, you can make the right decisions to improve the customer experience, avoid customer issues, and delight them with an experience that exceeds customer expectations.

Examples of Generating Customer Insights from Unhappy Customers

Example - 1

With a robust customer experience analytics tool, a digital bank has figured out the aspect that drives unhappiness in baking customers with traditional and neobank/digital banks.

They could understand that many potential customers are unhappy with the account closure procedure in digital banks, while poor card services make traditional bank customers unhappy.

When they dig deeper into the top concerns of both banks, they can understand more details.

The neobank/digital bank customers are primarily concerned with getting messages about closing their accounts, locking their accounts, and deleting their accounts. Also, difficulty in accessing their accounts led to customer unhappiness.

Difficulty in knowing the card balance, increasing credits, issuing new cards, learning card information, and getting the cards delivered are the main concerns in the customer experience of traditional bank customers.

The digital bank understood the customer unhappiness elements in their app and online platforms and fixed them as soon as possible. This helped them to reduce negative customer experiences eventually.

Example - 2

A QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) brand has to figure out the pain points in the customers’ experience to improve their experience and overall bottom line with customer success.

When adopting the customer experience analytics platform, it is found that the ordering experience and app performance make the customers unhappy.

Digging deeper into the main 2 concerns unraveled more insights.

Orders are getting canceled, and not being able to complete orders are the main concerns of customers around the ordering experience. Poor performance, crashing, and glitches on the app are the other factors that make customers unhappy.

With these insights, the QSR brand could improve their customers' ordering experience and the app's efficiency and significantly transform the customer experience.

Empower Front-liners to Deal with Unhappy Customers

Front-liners are primarily in touch with customers directly from the onboarding process to the post-sales experience. And they are responsible for handling the feedback loop. Hence, after finishing a conversation and interaction with a customer, they can ask openly about their experience with the brand and ask to rate the customer service agent's performance.

In most companies, customers are prompted to rate the performance of the customer service agent. Even though the agents helped them very well and were good at their job, people tend to give poor customer feedback based on the overall brand experience.

For instance, if you have a wifi service provider company, and you have increased the charge due to the new technology upgrades, the customers won't be happy and tend to give a poor rating to your customer service representative who communicated that information.

So, you won't be aware of the negative experience, moreover, the 'unhappiness' your customers feel with the cost increase; instead, your customer service agents will become demotivated as they get poor ratings.

Training them to ask the right questions will help unearth all unhappiness in their experience.

First of all, they should be motivated and valued inside the organization. Employee experience can contribute a lot to customer experience.

A motivated employee will be productive and patient with customers since a sense of responsibility will be grown by default if they work in an employee-friendly environment. Suppose a front-liner asks more questions based on customer emotions and makes them comfortable to open up about their experience. In that case, it will help to know the unhappiness in their customer reviews in detail and offer personalized customer experience to the customers individually. This will further help in improving customer loyalty and customer retention.

Also, customers should be asked the right questions, like their experience with the products, in addition to the performance of customer service reps.

How to Act Upon Unhappy Customer Feedback?

If you have a significantly lower audience volume, it will be easy to understand the conflicting priorities of customers and provide the experience exclusively to individuals according to customer feedback.

But, the larger the audience, the more complex the personalization process. So, sometimes, you can’t deliver an experience that provides customer satisfaction. In that case, you can try your maximum to segment customers based on their priorities and curate experiences for them.

Some aspects that drive unhappiness or dissatisfaction can be made as customizable options to satisfy multiple customer segments simultaneously.

For example, when you check the insights and see some customers do not like the dip you provide with the meal pack in your QSR, and they suggest getting another specific dip, you can’t change it instantly since there are happy customers who like the current dip you provide.

In such cases, you can make these 2 dips available for customers and allow them to choose one when they place their order.

Based on the niche and industry, you can alter your solutions.

To Sum Up,

Customers can become happy or unhappy anytime, even if there is nothing wrong with your side. Many factors will influence their experience, including their personal preferences. As a brand, you must pick the insights from each unhappy customer's feedback and brainstorm them with your team to act upon them efficiently. To get a clear idea about the main unhappiness elements and insights into them, you can get the help of a customer analytics platform.

Hence, always keep an eye on your customer’s experience and the unhappiness they experience. And turn these dissatisfied customers into loyal customers with the right decisions for customer satisfaction.

Unhappy Customers Are Your Greatest Source of Customer Insights

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