Detractors…Love ’em or Leave ’em?

Your Voice of the Customer (VoC) or Net Promoter Score ® (NPS) program will undoubtedly uncover detractors. Detractors are out there, hurting your business. The real question is what do you do about it?

Detractors are survey respondents (people!) who showed up in your VoC program and submitted negative Net Promoter Scores and/or negative commentary. They are the same people that are hurting your business because aside from their survey response, they can also be telling the world about their discontent with you thanks to social media and word of mouth.

Treat detractors seriously because they can do some real damage to your brand. Bain states that detractors make up 80% of negative word of mouth.

Should you love your detractors?

Personally, I LOVE detractors! I don’t love having them, and I regret that something is upsetting them. However, I love them for their feedback and the brutal truths they deliver.

I view detractors as the people that actually care enough to tell me what’s wrong with my company, product, and/or processes. The detractor may not realize it, but they are typically the most willing people to help the company get better. Why? Because they are highly communicative and if you listen, they will tell you exactly what they need and want or tell you what is broken about your company. It’s information that you can take straight to the bank if you choose to use it wisely.

Here are a few ways to manage and take full advantage of your detractors:

Don’t play hot potato!

Detractors are real people with real frustrations and a need that isn’t being fulfilled somehow. Design your Voice of the Customer program to include a process that acts on detractor responses accordingly. Ensure that you have an established owner of customer issues who has authority in your company and can solicit other actors in the organization for their assistance to resolve the customer’s issue where required.

When you receive a negative survey response act quickly and personally:

• Communicate with the survey respondent (by phone preferably)
• Be empathetic
• Negotiate on a cure plan (action plan, timing, etc.).
  • In B2C cases, ensure that your representative is empowered to fix the issue on the spot if they can
  • In B2B products with higher complexity, you may not be prepared to determine a full action plan, and that’s OK. Ensure that you communicate your intentions to develop a cure plan and follow up with them once it has been established.
• Don’t pass the customer to other team members (that will increase their frustration)
• Do what you say you will do (ensure that your team executes well for this customer)

Managing your detractor’s cure plan (remediation plan) well leaves you is a great position to not only turn them around but turn them into one of your strongest promoters.

Document and Analyze

I once worked for a CEO who loved the saying, “You can’t manage what you aren’t tracking.” I swear that was my (then) CEO’s tag line and it always made me laugh at how painfully numbers-driven he was. The thing is, he’s completely right.

Tracking similarities among your detractors will point you in the right direction to find root causes. Your analytics can be as intensely detailed or as high level as you’d like. Whatever you choose, ensure that you have enough data to extract information on the systemic issues. If you aren’t tracking detractors, you can start with a spread sheet. Something like the below should be simple and sufficient enough to get you started.

Note: The information that you’ll be gathering to assess reason codes, and customer comments about each reason code, will come from your verbal interaction with your Detractors.

Once you have the beginnings of analytics, you can add additional elements to your report set such as:

• Net Promoter Score
• User Profile Type (admin, power user, etc.)
• Product(s) purchased

Fix the Systemic Issues

You have the Detractor’s feedback. You’re working to help the resolve their individual issue. You’ve tracked the feedback trends. Now you’re ready to fix the systemic issues that have emerged.

The issues will probably implicate lots of teams and/or processes. Issues can arise from lots of places:

• Sales & marketing
• Product
• Onboarding
• Customer Support
• Support documentation
• Etc.

This is where the authority of your Voice of Customer program owner comes in again. The systemic issues get fixed when the program owner is empowered to drive change. Or is sufficiently influential to do the same.