Business and Marketing

The bad news is that you'll be the one to lose it if you can't address customer complaints on the first pass.

According to Accenture's annual “Global Consumer Pulse” study, 64% of consumers said they switched providers of services such as cable TV, Internet, and insurance last year. Less than a third described themselves as “very loyal” to any particular brand and six out of 10 professed they were more likely to abandon companies than they were 10 years ago. By Accenture's reckoning, that makes forking for a $1.6 trillion “Switching Economy” that's up for grabs in the United States.

Sounds enticing, but the fact of the matter is that few enterprises are up to the challenge. They keep failing the severest test of direct marketing: addressing valued customer's complaints. More than 80% of switchers told Accenture (which surveyed 23,665 people worldwide) that they would have stayed with their old providers if they had just resolved their problems when they'd first aired them.

“It's a decade-old problem,” says Robert Wollan, global managing director of strategy for sales and customer service at Accenture, which has conducted the “Pulse” study in each of the past 10 years. “Not solving an issue during the first interaction was the chief complaint of 86% of people in 2014 and 84% of people in 2009. Customer expectations continue to rise and companies are not keeping pace.”

As consumers acquire and adapt to new technologies and buying habits, they become more open to trying new products, brands, and providers. Two fifths of consumers globally said they find themselves evaluating or considering other providers more often than they did just two years ago, and half said they relied more on recommendations from other people in evaluating providers than they did in the Accenture study's first iteration 10 years ago. “They've trained themselves to believe they're going to continue to switch,” Wollan observes.

Additionally, more than half of people said they have become more impatient with the buying decision process and want it to be quick and painless. “Customers are taking experiences from one industry and transferring it to all industries,” says Wollan, who noted that survey participants were quizzed about their dealings in 10 different verticals. “They'll say, I can walk into Starbucks and get my coffee 20 different ways, or I can track my pizza delivery on my phone. Why can't I find out exactly when I can get in to see a doctor or what day my mortgage is going to be approved? The expectation of transparency is quickly migrating across all industries.”

Aside from the ongoing challenge of making better use of technology to address consumer issues, Wollan advises companies to seek help from partners. “There's a wireless company in Europe that's been very successful in retaining customers by offering free access to services such as payment systems from outside providers,” Wollan says. “They use partnership to add value.”

Among its conclusions, the Accenture study points to one of the most vexing problems facing marketers today: Digital's rise has given them untold options for interacting with consumers, but they've been too slow to recognize the interaction preferences of different segments of customers.

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