We saw over at Church of the Customer Blog that some new research has attempted to quantify the effect of bad word of mouth. The statistics aren’t encouraging for companies inclined to approach the concept of customer satisfaction only in the aggregate.

Here are the statistics:

• Almost half of shoppers say they avoid a particular store because of someone else’s negative experience.
• 31% of customers tell one or more friends about a problem they experienced with a store. But on average, shoppers tell four people about their negative shopping experience.
• Negative word of mouth influences future patronage up to five times more than the person who experienced the problem first-hand due to the Telephone Game Effect, meaning that the orginal problem description is continually embellished as it passes from person to person.

This would be bad enough for companies in the days before blogging and the Internet, when people simply griped to their friends. But the sudden explosion of consumerist-oriented blogs (like, hey, this one!) means that a customer complaint and a breach of trust travels a lot farther than it once did. That customer you didn’t satisfy yesterday is the one writing to us today, sharing his or her negative experience with 20,000 other readers. In other words — that one customer you pissed off, according to the research cited above, might very shortly become 10,000 people boycotting your store.

Of course, the solution is simple. Companies! Stop treating your customers like crap. Stop foisting one-sided contracts upon them. Stop tuning out and automatically switching into automoton head nodding mode when a consumer voices a complaint. Stop making like you’re doing us a favor by selling us something, as opposed to the other way around. In other words, start conducting your business as if you have a personal bond to each and every one of your customers. Then we can close up shop.

One suspects that sites like The Consumerist are going to be around for a long time to come, however…

The velocity of bad WOM [Church of the Customer Blog]

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