Flipping the Coin: A Guide to Providing Poor Customer Experiences

After three years of sharing insights and knowledge about customer experience, it's time to take a different approach. Instead of focusing on how to establish and improve customer experience, let's explore how to create a bad, poor, or unpleasant experience for your customers.

The rationale behind detailing these failure points is the prevalence of companies that, whether consciously or not, engage in behaviors that predictably result in negative customer interactions.

1. Neglect Communication: This is a cornerstone of bad customer experience. Effective communication is crucial for building trust and resolving issues. Failing here guarantees frustration.

• Ignore inquiries: This is perhaps the most blatant form of disrespect. Not responding to emails, messages, or calls sends the message that the customer is not valued. It creates anxiety and forces customers to waste time trying to get in touch. This includes ignoring social media mentions and comments as well.
• Provide vague and unhelpful information: Even when you do respond, using jargon, technical terms, or overly complex language confuses customers. Avoiding direct answers and failing to offer concrete solutions leaves them feeling lost and unheard. This also includes giving different answers to the same question depending on who the customer speaks to.
• Keep customers waiting: Long hold times on the phone, extended email response times, and slow service in general demonstrate a lack of respect for the customer's time. This creates a sense of being unimportant and can lead to immediate dissatisfaction. Automated messages that offer no real information or estimated wait times only exacerbate the problem.

2. Disregard Customer Needs: This demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding or care for the customer.

• Don't listen: Ignoring customer feedback, complaints, and suggestions shows that their opinions are irrelevant. This can lead to resentment and a feeling of being unheard. Not actively seeking feedback in the first place is also a major oversight.
• Offer irrelevant products or services: Pushing products or services that don't address the customer's specific needs or solve their problems wastes their time and creates a feeling of being manipulated. This shows a focus on sales rather than customer satisfaction.
• Make it difficult to find information: Hiding contact information, burying product details in complex menus, and creating a confusing website or app forces customers to work hard to get the information they need. This creates unnecessary frustration and a sense of being deliberately obstructed.

3. Provide Poor Service: This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of direct interaction with customers.

• Be rude and unhelpful: Training staff to be dismissive, condescending, or outright rude is a surefire way to drive customers away. This creates a negative emotional experience and can lead to public complaints and negative reviews.
• Don't take responsibility for mistakes: Blaming customers for their problems or making excuses for company shortcomings avoids accountability and further frustrates customers. Owning mistakes and taking steps to rectify them is crucial for maintaining trust.
• Make returns and refunds difficult: Creating a complicated return policy with numerous restrictions, hidden fees, and long processing times discourages customers from making purchases and creates a sense of being trapped. This also damages trust and makes customers feel like they're being cheated.

4. Create Inconsistency: Predictability and reliability are essential for building trust. Inconsistency undermines both.

• Change policies and procedures frequently: Constantly changing the rules keeps customers off balance and creates confusion. This makes it difficult for them to understand what to expect and can lead to frustration and distrust.
• Offer inconsistent service across channels: Providing different experiences depending on whether customers contact you by phone, email, or social media creates a disjointed and confusing experience. Consistency across all channels is crucial for maintaining a unified brand image and customer experience.
• Don't personalize the experience: Treating all customers the same, regardless of their individual needs or preferences, shows a lack of attention to detail and a failure to recognize their value as individuals. Personalization, even in small ways, can significantly improve customer satisfaction.

5. Ignore the Digital Experience: In today's digital world, a poor online experience can be just as damaging as a bad in-person interaction.

• Have a slow and buggy website: A slow-loading website, broken links, and frequent errors create a frustrating and unprofessional impression. This can lead to customers abandoning the site and going to competitors.
• Don't optimize for mobile: In a mobile-first world, a website that isn't optimized for mobile devices is practically unusable for many customers. This creates a significant barrier to entry and can lead to lost business.
• Ignore social media: Not responding to comments, messages, or reviews on social media platforms shows a lack of engagement and a disregard for customer feedback. This can damage your online reputation and lead to negative word-of-mouth.

By understanding these "failure tips" in detail, businesses can identify areas where they might be unintentionally creating negative customer experiences and take steps to improve.