The Root Cause of Customer Dissatisfaction

Unmet customer expectations result in customer dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction does not originate from the activities of the frontline staff, as many executives tend to think. Rather, it springs up from various corners of the organisation. In his book, Strategic Customer Service, John A. Goodman states that 50-60 per cent of the unmet expectations are from defective products, misleading marketing messages, ineffective policies or broken internal process, with employee internal mistakes and bad attitudes contributing only 20-30 per cent and customer errors and unreasonable expectations accounting for the remaining 20-30 per cent. Organisations need to understand what their customers expect from them before offering products in the market, so as to minimize losses, in terms of sales, and maximize their profitability.