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Keeping an eye out for ‘silent’ customers

The Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore also measures another metric, the True Non-Complaint Rate, which tracks the proportion of customers who did not complain because they had no reason to.

The Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore also measures another metric, the True Non-Complaint Rate, which tracks the proportion of customers who did not complain because they had no reason to.

This also factors in other reasons for not complaining, such as customers feeling there was no point in doing so, or feeling it was too difficult to complain.

While this group may not complain through official channels, Assistant Professor of Marketing (Practice) and academic director of the Institute of Service Excellence, Dr Marcus Lee, felt organisations would be ignoring this group at their own peril.

“These ‘silent’ customers may not file a complaint through the regular channels, but they will nonetheless vent their frustration.

“Monitoring, and engaging such customers through social media will be useful to see where service failures are happening,” he said.

“If an increasing proportion of customers feel it’s too difficult or there’s no point in complaining, companies should start looking at their feedback systems and processes.

“A caveat though: When companies engage customers about their grievances, they must be ready to satisfactorily resolve the issue.

“Failure to do so would have a severe impact on customer satisfaction. As an example, in the CSISG 2014 study, customers who had a complaint well-handled gave an average CSISG score of 68.5, not far off the national score of 71.1. But handle the complaint badly? A dismal CSISG score of 37.3.”

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