Report: What Happens After a Good or Bad Experience, 2016

We just published a Temkin Group report, What Happens After a Good or Bad Experience, 2016. This is our annual analysis of which companies deliver the most and least bad experiences, how consumers respond after those experience (in terms of sharing those experiences and changing their purchase behaviors), and the effect of service recovery (see last year’s report).

Here’s the executive summary:

We asked 10,000 U.S. consumers about their recent interactions with 315 companies across 20 industries, and compared results with similar studies over the previous five years. More than 20% of the customers of Internet service providers and TV service providers reported a bad experience, considerably above the rates for any other industry. Air Tran Airways, Time Warner Cable (TV service and Internet service), Comcast (TV service), and HSBC delivered bad experience to at least one-quarter of their customers. At the same time, less than 3% of Michael’s, Advance Auto Parts, Whole Foods, Publix, Subway, Vanguard, Trader Joe’s, and GameStop customers report having bad experiences. We examined the combination of the volume of bad experiences and the resulting revenue impact and created a Revenues at Risk Index for all 20 industries. At the top of the list, TV service providers and rental car agencies stand to lose at least 6.5% of their revenue from bad experiences. Conversely, less than 2% of the revenues for retailers and supermarket chains are at risk. The companies that recovered very poorly after a bad experience lost sales from 63% of their customers, more than 2.5 times as many as companies that recovered very well. Companies that do a very good job at recovering after a bad experience have more customers who increase spending than those who decrease spending. After a very bad or very good experience, consumers are more likely to give feedback directly to the company than they are to post on Facebook, Twitter, or third party rating sites. Regardless of the channel, consumers are more likely to discuss a very bad experience than a very good one. While the way that consumers give feedback has not changed much since last year, the volume of Twitter usage grew for both positive and negative experiences. Piggly Wiggly, US Cellular, Fifth Third, The Hartford, TriCare, and PSE&G face the potential for the most negatively biased feedback from customers.

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Here are excerpted versions of 4 (out of 15) graphics in the report:

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The bottom line: Bad experiences are a real problem, especially if you don’t recover well.