It used to be that if someone didn’t get great service, they could gripe to their friends about it.
But these days, they can tell thousands, if not millions of people about it…almost instantly…and all from the comfort of their living room or car or wherever they are.
And with news of bad customer service reaching more than TWICE as many ears as praise for good service, that can spell disaster for businesses who haven’t really focused on creating a consistently awesome experience for their customers.
Just like United Airlines found out when they upset a customer on a flight from Chicago to Omaha.
You see, it turns out the customer was a Canadian musician named Dave Carroll who said he heard a fellow passenger say that the ground crew were throwing guitars on the tarmac.
When Carroll arrived at his destination and discovered his beloved $3,500 Taylor Guitar had been destroyed, he put 2 and 2 together and asked United to pay for the repairs.
When the airline essentially refused to work with Dave to resolve the situation in a reasonable manner, he did something very interesting that created a huge amount of pain and humiliation for United Airlines.
He wrote a song.
Called “United Breaks Guitars” Dave’s complaint song was an instant viral sensation, amassing 150,000 views in just 1 day and then snow-balling from there (it’s up to more than 16 million views as of this post).
And the kicker is that he posted the song way back in 2009 – so it’s been out there creating bad publicity for United all this time!
Regardless of the details, this story goes to show how just one disgruntled customer can have a massive impact on a business, even a big business like United…
And for smaller businesses, one viral bad review can be enough to close you down.
So making sure you have your customer experience journey mapped out and the checks and balances in place to really minimize any customer dissatisfaction is more important than ever.
That’s why you need to start paying attention to CX Design – or Customer Experience Design.
Don’t worry if you’re not sure what all the jargon means.
I’m here to de-mystify it for you.
And I’ve got a free training coming soon that will help you see what you need to do and when to make sure you don’t end up with your own Dave Carroll in your business.
Keep an eye out…it’s coming real soon.
In the meantime, it’s a great idea to start thinking about the kinds of things customers might be complaining about or finding difficult – that gives you a clue as to one of the first places you need to start applying CX Design.