Customers are Often Authors of Their Own Dissatisfaction

Clients unhappy? Not paying their bills? According to University of Victoria business profs, customers are often the cause of their own problems but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored by an organization. “It is human nature to blame the last person involved in a problem, in this case the customer, rather than look at the root causes of the problem,” says UVic business professor and service specialist Dr. Mark Colgate. “As a result, we often penalize the customer instead of preventing the problem from happening in the first place.”
A recent study of customer failure by Colgate and other business professors showed that as more firms shift to self-service technologies, customers will take on greater responsibility for their own service quality and their failures will become more prevalent. An example of customer failure is when customers don’t complain. “One method we are testing is a direct call to action,” says Rebecca Wilson-Mah, a learning coach at the Fairmont Empress Hotel which participated in the study. “As guests check in, we personally ask them to call us with their concerns and comments and wait for them to respond by saying ‘yes’, rather than using the more conventional, ‘please don’t hesitate to call with concerns’, phrase.” The pilot resulted in clients providing suggestions and raising issues that would not have been addressed.
Colgate co-authored the study with his UVic Business colleague Dr. Steve Tax and Dr. David Bowen from the Thunderbird Garvin School of International Management in Arizona. Their research paper on customer created problems, “How to Prevent Your Customers from Failing,” is published in the spring 2006 issue of the Sloan Management Review. UVic has the only MBA program in Canada that offers a specialization in service management.

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