At our client conference last week, Greg used some stats from the UKCSI about consumer complaining behaviour which I want to share here.
The UKCSI is a national measure of customer satisfaction that we conduct for the Institute of Customer Service, and is a great way of analysing broad trends across the UK consumer landscape. We can dive into the results for indivdiual sectors and organisations, but it’s interesting to establish some broad averages for the UK as a whole. Each set of results is based on 26,000 reponses, so the findings are pretty robust.
12% of customers say that they have had a problem with their supplier in the last year, and 75% of those told a member of staff about their problem (whether it was logged as a complaint is another question!).
It’s interesting that 25% of customers still don’t give organisations the chance to fix their problem, despite all that we say nowadays about “a complaint is a gift” and so on. Why didn’t they?
Contrary to popular belief, only 11% of non-complainers put it down to their (stereotypically British?) dislike of complaining. Depressingly, 50% of customers don’t tell anyone about their problem because they don’t believe there’s any point. Many customers know from bitter experience that complaining doesn’t get you anywhere, except in certain sectors or if you can get it escalated to the gods.
The next three answers all point to a cumbersome complaints process, and so does “didn’t know how to”—complaining is seen as time-consuming, confusing, and difficult—all in all 47% of customers said that at least one of these things put them off complaining (this is a mutiple response question, so the total if you just add up the responses comes to more than that).
The cold, hard, fact is that, despite everything British organisations say about complaint handling, 25% of customers with a problem don’t complain. Why? Mostly because they don’t think anything will happen, or because the complaints process does not encourage complaints.
