Things Your Customers Will Never Tell You

Regardless of how honest you are with your customers and clients, they'll never fully reciprocate. They won't necessarily be dishonest with you, but you'll be hard-pressed enjoy full transparency. And if you aren't careful, their unwillingness to be forthcoming their feedback and criticism could undermine your company's ability to satisfy their long-term needs and wants.

Customer Transparency Doesn't Exist

People are opinionated. If you have 100 clients for door to door car shipping and just two of them are offering up criticism, providing feedback, or making suggestions, something is off. The other 98 have thoughts, too - they just aren't willing to share them. This could be true for any number of reasons, including:

• They don't think you'll listen.Customers become jaded over time. They recall times when they offered a piece of feedback or criticism to a company and nothing was ever done about it. This makes them less likely to offer feedback in the future.
• They expect a canned response.Sometimes businesses do respond to feedback. Unfortunately, it typically comes in the form of a canned response that's clearly been copy and pasted. (Canned responses are especially dangerous on social media, where customers can scroll through a company's feed and see the same responses over and over again.) This discourages people from saying anything.
• They fear being called out.Has your business every shot back at an employee when they said something incorrect, inflammatory, or unwanted? If so, your customers may have a fear of being called out publicly (even if their feedback is truthful).
• They don't understand.Are your branding, customer service, and consumer education efforts pretentious? Do you assume that your customers have certain product knowledge? If customers don't understand - and don't feel like you care to explain - they won't speak up for fear of feeling dumb or exposed.
• They think they're alone.Sometimes customers think they're the only ones who are experiencing certain issues, problems, or questions. And if they think they're alone, they're less likely to say something. They'll just suck it up and move on.
• They find it difficult.Your customers may actually have a lot to say - they just can't find a way to get through. This is less of a problem in the digital age, but it can still be problematic. You need ample options for customers to communicate with you (including both overt and anonymous methods).
• They don't care.The absolute worst-case scenario is that your customers no longer care. When customers are apathetic towards issues and conce s, they aren't going to put forth the effort to communicate. They'll either grit teeth and continue to have low expectations, or they'll switch to one of your competitors.

While a certain kind of customer will speak out when there's a clear issue - like a nasty bathroom or broken glass on a table - most of the smaller issues go unspoken. This includes things like foul smells, dusty shelves, or disorganized products.

When customers don't understand how something like a loyalty program works, they get frustrated and simply stop using it. They're not typically going to go through the process of asking a bunch of questions and seeking clarity. This leaves you with a convoluted program that's resource-intensive, yet provides little tangible value.

Good treatment usually garners some positive feedback. Bad treatment will typically incite strong negative feedback. But when employees are apathetic, it often goes unspoken. Customers can tell that your employees don't want to be there, but keep it to themselves. This makes it difficult to make useful changes.