How to Turn a Bad Experience to Good and Regain Trust?

• Customer experience is an end-to-end process including certain steps and inevitable feelings around these steps. In fact, the customer experience, which can be designed purely mathematically from a process point of view, can also be positive or negative due to the emotions around it. For this reason, it is difficult to measure and challenging to recover.
• If a customer’s emotions are not good after any exposure related to the company, it means that there is a negative customer experience.

• Low reputation
• Poor relationship with customers, accordingly decreasing customer loyalty and engagement
• Negative customer attitudes toward the company
• Increasing negative communication about the company among existing and potential customers

• Online comments: All the online sources will be helpful to understand the customers’ feelings after the experience. You need to follow all user-generated content from various online sources such as forums, Google comments, industrial websites, social media accounts, etc.
• Complaint management: Complaints are the most valuable sources and complaining customers are the most valuable consumers for a company to increase the quality of the experience. Keeping that in mind, all complaints should be taken into consideration and the process before and after the complaint must be tracked in detail to understand what that customer experienced and how you can gain him/her back.
• Regular market research: Whether qualitative or quantitative, the periodical research data will show the trend of customer perceptions about your company. Especially qualitative data gathered after the experience will provide rich insights about experience quality.
• Ad-hoc research: After new implications about the customer experience, some ad-hoc research will provide important perspectives of consumers which are the indicators of return on customer experience investment.
• Be the customer of your own company: It is hard to act as a problematic customer for your own company, but if you turn your suspicious eye, you can detect the faults in the process.

• Defining negative customer experience as “poor” can be a great way to indicate that there are some missing things although it could be better. Do not forget that there is always better.
• A company can convert a poor experience into a rich one by spending more time considering the emotions of the customers in an empathic way, and by giving an effort to regain the customers who are exposed to negative experiences.
• Collecting the complaints and improving the relevant areas are not enough. You should go back to the complaining customer and show your effort off, inviting him/her to the company again.
• Small favors such as discount codes, free products, or services can be effective. However, the communication of those must be subtle. If the customer perceives it as a bribe, it will create unrepairable damage in attitude.
• Being honest with the customer is the easiest and the greatest way to turn a poor experience into a rich one. Remember that a complaint is an opportunity to create a new high-quality customer experience with the response you give.

Two points of view are required: Engineer and Social Scientist.

Engineering will help design a proper customer experience process step by step while social science will help design a proper communication plan with customers to understand their emotions.

This article first appeared in Cloud4Feed’s CX Kaleidoscope Yearbook 2024 and is published here as written by the author. Part 2 of 8