134.400 EUR! This is the cost of not knowing who your unhappy customers are!

Customer recovery, which can be defined as the reaction to negative customer feedback that leads to the “return of the lost customer” is in the mind of e-shops and all customer facing companies (e.g. supermarket, telcos, fashion, retail, etc), regardless of their size. A quick look on the strategy of the succesful players of each vertical is enough to understand that the foundation of their succcess is not the extensive discounts, but the development of customer management best practices. Detecting the unhappy customers and doing what has to be done to recover them is a fundamental element of these best practices.

So, what should I do to achieve customer recovery?

By examining they way that 98 e-shops in Greece exploit the customer feedback that is collected through e-satisfaction’s platform, we have distinguished and sharing 4 basic principals of a customer recovery strategy, that e-shops are using to convert their unhappy customer into happy ambassadors of the e-shop!

1. Ask your customers! Whenever you can and on Everywhere you interact with them

According to the 1st Financial Training Service91% of unhappy customers will never come back. If an e-shop wishes to recover them, it is necessary to get in touch with them and by following a systematic and methodological approach, help them express their complaints. Complaints and feedback should be collected across the shopping journey of a customer and especially on the crucial stages of this journey, such as the moment of checkout process finalization or the moment of delivery.

2. Act instantly when you deal with unhappy customers

70% ofunhappy customers say they would gladly give a second chance to an e-shop or retail store that take their complaint under consideration. For this reason, customer facing companies should pay attention when customers complaint and make them feel that every complaint has been heard and appreciated and that corrective actions will be immediately be taken to fix what caused the complaint.

To help e-shops meet this “respond immediately” requirement, we created a new Customer Feedback Automation, named Customer Recovery Call Back Request. When Customer Recovery Call Back Request is enabled, e-shops provide unhappy customers can ask the e-shop to get in touch with them, at the time of their convenience, to express their complaint and find a way to fix it. The purpose of this Customer Recovery Call Back Request is to make unhappy customers feel that although they endured a negative experience, the e-shop is always on and always there to help them.

3. Be customer friendly. Not only through design, but always!

The term “user friendly” has multiple meanings in the fields of e-commerce, concerning most of the times technical issues such as design of user interfaces. In the case of an unhappy customer “customer friendliness” is even more important, as special care should be taken when deciding how to ask for customer feedback, when this feedback will be collected and how to respond to this feedback. All these actions need attention and meticulous planning since a phone call in an inconvenient for the customer time or an automated, non personalized email can cause the opposite results from what e-shops wants.

4. Feedback that is coming from unhappy customer is a hidden treasure 

Unhappy customers are the most strict judges. They may have different requirements or complaints they are a great source of information. For this reason, customer complaints should be dealt as a chance to rebuild customer relationships and as a chance for improvement. Some of the world’s most successful companies have based their accomplishments in internal changes that were triggered through the exploitation of negative customer feedback. That means, that their need and action for improvement was not just another task but a part of their daily routing.

Customer Recovery requests nothing more than e-shop’s will to hear, understand and help an unhappy customer, combined with improvement actions and immediate response. The basic principles mentioned in this article can help e-shops reach closer to its target which is both the amelioration of customer relationship and its overall improvement.

What is e-satisfaction?

e-satisfaction is the #1 Humanized Marketing Platform for e-Business that combines customer feedback with actual automated marketing mechanisms that aim to recover or retain your customers. e-satisfaction is used by hundreds of e-businesses, helping them to go one step closer to customer centricity.

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