Editorial
The Gist
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Rage triggers revealed. Frustration with interactive voice response systems and poor escalation processes lead to significant customer rage and dissatisfaction.
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Proactive CX reduces issues. Setting proper expectations, offering clear escalation paths and educating customers can dramatically prevent problems and increase loyalty.
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Escalation drives loyalty. Proactive escalation improves satisfaction and revenue by reducing customer frustration, increasing loyalty and generating positive word of mouth.
The past five years have seen multiple forms of popular rage, driven by factors such as economics, COVID-19, politics and nationalism. Only recently has the rage boiled over in the consumer marketplace in situations such as the murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare and the disturbing level of social media support for the shooter. The shell casings at the crime scene articulated the complaints, “Delay” and “Deny.” Unfortunately, many companies have unwittingly built potential rage into their products and processes.
Customer Care Measurement & Consulting’s (CCMC) tenth National Rage Study, published in January 2024, found that the top cause of consumer rage was the struggle to reach a human being in a service situation. Frustration with interactive voice response (IVR) has existed for decades. This reminds me of an interview I did with service guru Tom Peters in the 1990s entitled, “Push one, push two, push three, push your customer over the edge!”
When you are already upset and then encounter more frustration, the blood drains from your brain and goes to your muscles (fight or flight), and you stop thinking clearly. An upset customer is not a rational customer. While the struggle to reach a human is a top issue, rage is also rooted in unmet expectations and being treated unfairly, often with no apology.
As a result of the rage described above, 43% of Americans admit to recently yelling at a service person, and 21% now think that physical threats are OK. Meanwhile, 9% have pursued revenge against a company.
Table of Contents
- How Poor Customer Service Practices Fuel Consumer Rage
- How Leading Companies Prevent Customer Rage and Create Delight
- The ROI of Proactive Escalation in Customer Experience Management
- Effective Strategies for Implementing an Anti-Rage Escalation Plan
- Core Questions Around Customer Rage and Managing the Customer Experience
How Poor Customer Service Practices Fuel Consumer Rage
Almost every company creates rage by intentionally doing at least three of the following five actions, all of which reflect poor customer experience management practices. Evaluate your own company and see if you honestly can say you don’t do these things.
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Hide product limitations and important details in fine print, terms and conditions or appendices.
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Hide the 800 number to encourage self-service and create barriers to escalation.
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Staff in a manner that often results in peak waits over five minutes with no progress report or virtual line for guaranteed call-backs.
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Provide staff with response guidance that minimizes the gravity of the customer issue or explains the policy but not the clear rationale behind the policy. For example, guidance might tell a service employee to say, “We’re sorry for the inconvenience of cancelling your flight,” yet it is much more than an inconvenience.
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Provide consistently poor responses, such as failing to follow through, repeating requests for the same information, not offering an apology, treating customers unfairly or failing to respond at all.
Related Article: The Worst CX Ever?
How Leading Companies Prevent Customer Rage and Create Delight
One study of five companies and 8,500 CPG consumers found that successful responses led to delight levels of 20%-42%, with a quarter of consumers stating they would purchase more from that company. Successful CX companies implement six practices in their customer experience management that either prevent problems or eliminate rage before it occurs.
Set Proper Expectations up Front in Marketing and Via Onboarding.
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Educate the customer on the three most prevalent unpleasant surprises. One insurance company sent a welcome letter pointing out three things consumers tended to miss in their homeowners policy, including limitations on valuables. While sales hated the letter, consumers would read it and ask to buy a rider for more coverage. Education generated significantly more revenue, and consumers indicated they would pay more for the company’s products.
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Set proper expectations via onboarding. A leading internet service provider used multiple tools (i.e., videos, welcome calls and emails) to educate people on the limitations of satellite internet. Those who were educated had 40% higher ratings and 30% less problems and service calls.
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Reduce or eliminate fine print. Avis had an online contract that had, in bold, “Here is the key fine print you need to know.” It highlighted the collision damage waiver.
Overtly Tell the Customer How to Escalate if They Are Not Happy.
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The Canadian phone company, TELUS, invites escalation to their management team on their website.
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Xfinity tells customers up front that if the system reset does not solve the problem, they will be escalated to a technically proficient human. This gets customers to agree to try the reset, which takes several minutes.
Identify When a Customer Is Unhappy With a Digital Interaction and Proactively Acknowledge it and Offer Escalation
AI can easily analyze chat conversations and identify when customers are not thrilled with the answer. If the customer is unhappy, you can try once more but then offer escalation.
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Skullcandy, the headphone company, uses AI in their customer experience management strategy to identify dissatisfaction and proactively offer escalation.
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Geico allows its staff to identify when a customer’s question requires specialized expertise, and they can offer a transfer to the appropriate expert and assure the customer of a short wait. Their confidence in the quick connection is reflected in both their words and tone, which puts customers at ease.
Ensure Human Contact in 90 Seconds, Offer a Callback or Show Queue Progress
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Toyota discovered that long wait times led to longer conversations, as customers began the interaction already irritated.
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Although companies incur costs for staffing shorter average speed of answers, the resulting increase in customer satisfaction more than justifies the investment (see section below).
Apologize Sincerely and Equip Staff with Clear Explanations
One simple action that reduces rage is to apologize in a genuine manner. Never use the word “inconvenience,” as every problem is worse than an inconvenience. Additionally, consider whether your staff (including chat support) is equipped with a clear and credible explanation for the action, policy or outcome that caused the frustration. Is there also a mechanism in place, such as surveys and AI analysis, to measure clarity and fairness?
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The satellite ISP mentioned above equipped the staff with both explanations and short videos that showed the physical cause of delays in transmission (travelling 44,000 miles to and back from a satellite). Customers provided with such explanations were not completely satisfied, but they were mollified and understood the limitations of rural internet service.
Equip Digital and Human Channels with Responses That Delight
Arm both digital and human/telephone channels with responses that intentionally delight customers.
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Delight, which encourages willingness to pay more for a product, is driven by transparency in explaining limitations, and it’s also supported by enthusiasm, empathy and intelligent cross-selling that fills a genuine need.
At Ryder Logistics, they promise excellent fleet uptime, but they also note that if a truck breaks down, they will spend up to two hours repairing it prior to replacing it. This exception shows they understand the realities of truck fleets.
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CCMC’s recent study found that leading brands like Pepsi and Purina are seeing up to 30% delighted consumers when presented with problems and questions.
Related Article: What’s Behind the Best and Worst Customer Service Strategies?
The ROI of Proactive Escalation in Customer Experience Management
Creating the economic case for investment in customer escalation involves two key components. First, marketing, sales and finance must be educated on all aspects of CX. Secondly, you need to quantify the cost of not investing in escalation.
Top management often fails to understand and appreciate four aspects of customer behavior.
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Customers with serious problems do not complain 50%-90%of the time. Even in B2B markets, the portion of customers who don't complain can range from 75% to 90%. Top management often incorrectly believes that no news is good news.
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Problems cause a severe negative impact on loyalty and sensitivity to price. On average, a serious problem decreases customer loyalty by 20% and doubles sensitivity to price. You cannot charge a premium for a product that causes problems.
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More than a third of customers fail to read directions or even contracts, which leads to many preventable unpleasant surprises. The same goes for B2B clients. I recently polled 250 CEOs of small to medium companies ($10-$100MM), and a third said their business customers failed to read contracts and misunderstood at least some critical parts of the relationship.
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Problems and poor service create negative word of mouth (WOM). The National Rage Study found that negative experiences are three times more likely to be shared than positive ones. In the B2B arena, positive WOM is the primary source of new customers. Customers often expect to face difficulty when escalating an issue, but in effective customer experience management, they are delighted and pleasantly surprised when escalation is proactively offered.
Develop a business case based on your company’s attrition, loyalty and WOM parameters, and use industry behavioral data where your own data is lacking. Ideally, connect dissatisfaction with specific pain points, which will allow you to prioritize opportunities based on both frequency and impact.
Using your existing satisfaction data, determine the percentage of customers who leave the service system dissatisfied. Two-thirds of these customers could have been retained with a simple escalation to an empowered staff member. Calculate the revenue lost per 100 complaints compared to the impact of investing $100 per customer to allow easy escalation. Assume each customer is worth $1,000 and that 75% of dissatisfied customers would escalate.
Even with a $100 investment per escalation, the return on revenue is 5X with a 75% success rate.
Be sure to vet the numbers with finance and marketing in advance. Use an intentionally conservative estimate of customer value so that when the business case is presented, the CFO’s only criticism will be that your customer value is too low and your business case is too conservative. In most companies, 50 percent of customer attrition can be prevented by creating a better customer experience. This will convince the rest of top management that you have a valid business case.
Effective Strategies for Implementing an Anti-Rage Escalation Plan
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Analyze issues and divide into three groups: self-service, grey areas and complex human issues. Intensively measure satisfaction in the grey area and offer escalation.
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Eliminate unpleasant surprises. Proactively educate customers on the most prevalent issues, and explain the rationale for why outcomes are the way they are. In many cases, as the explanation is being drafted, product management may decide to resolve the issue.
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Create a response strategy that includes intentional delight.
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Pilot the impact of investing in reduced wait times. Several outsourcing providers have set themselves apart by delivering higher satisfaction to demanding customers, resulting in significantly higher margins compared to the average BPO vendor.
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Overtly offer escalation when customers are dissatisfied, and use AI and on-the-fly surveys to identify when escalation is appropriate.
Discouraging an unhappy customer from escalating is the primary cause of rage, and it ends up costing five times as much in lost revenue and negative word of mouth. AI can identify and facilitate intelligent escalation processes, which greatly improves customer experience management.
Core Questions Around Customer Rage and Managing the Customer Experience
Editor's note: Here are two important questions to ask about customer rage and customer experience management:
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How can poor customer experience management lead to consumer rage?
What often builds frustration is hiding product limitations, discouraging easy escalation and providing inadequate responses. This frustration leads to consumer rage, which can manifest as increased anger, threats or even retaliation against companies. Addressing issues like long wait times, lack of transparency and inefficient self-service processes is critical in preventing customer dissatisfaction.
How does proactive escalation improve customer satisfaction and revenue?
Proactive escalation makes sure that dissatisfied customers are quickly connected to a human agent who can resolve their issues. By addressing problems before they escalate, companies reduce frustration, support loyalty and generate positive word-of-mouth. This approach leads to higher satisfaction levels, more repeat business and ultimately an increase in revenue due to customer retention and positive recommendations.
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