Customers can be a company’s best friend or worst enemy (a frenemy, perhaps?)—and it is often tough to predict which it will be. Many service executives I’ve spoken with firmly believe that a disappointed customer is actually a word of mouth best friend in the works…all we need to do is ‘wow’ them with our recovery and they will shout from the mountain tops just how good our company is. And companies active in social media channels will particularly ascribe to this tenet, operating under the notion that negative Tweets, for example, are opportunities to recover a customer and then wait for public accolades about how nice the people are at our companies.

It would be nice if it reality always turned out like this, but at the end of the day, research tells us otherwise.

In asking customers if they speak positively or negatively about a company to others, we’ve interestingly found that customers talk about a company’s products and a company’s customer service very different. When it comes to products, if a customer is spreading word of mouth, it’s likely to be positive.

When it comes to service, however, it is VERY likely that the customer is spreading negative word of mouth. What’s worse is that they are telling many people—many more than when they are spreading positive word of mouth. When it comes to speaking positively about customer service to other people, it just doesn’t happen all that often.

Why the tendency to speak nicely about products but negatively about service? An example that my colleague Rick likes to use sums it up nicely, I think. Consider suggesting a restaurant, movie, or book to a friend. Your friend then goes to the restaurant, for example, and is extremely impressed. Your friend will thank you…as if you built the restaurant or you cooked the meal. You essentially own that person’s relationship with the restaurant.

Now, consider a negative service scenario. You aren’t going to spend time dwelling on that last rep who finally resolved the issue. No, you are going to tell anyone who will listen what an unpleasant experience it was to deal with the company in question. You want sympathy…along the lines of  ”oh, you poor thing…I know it’s the WORST when that happens”.  Sound familiar?

This isn’t the best news, I know. But I think the key message here is this: if we know that customer word of mouth about customer service is more than likely going to be negative, then we should do our best to not give them anything to talk about. We can’t control the message, but we CAN (and should!) control the opportunities. Think about the Twitter example I mentioned above…shouldn’t we be thinking about ways to avoid that first Tweet—the incredibly negative one—to begin with?

For our regular readers, you can probably guess where I’m going next…that’s right, you need to think about how to reduce customer effort. Provide a low-effort experience and you’ve at least minimized the opportunities for that negative word of mouth.

What are your thoughts? Why is it that customers are so prone to spread that negative word of mouth? What do you do to avoid it?

Related posts:

1. The Science of Saying the Word ‘No’
2. The Art of Saying the Word ‘No’
3. Rate Your Customer Service Experiences Using this New App
4. How Call Centers Use Behavioral Economics to Sway Customers