blending the mix

Church of the Customer Blog: The velocity of bad WOM recounts the following:

• Almost half of shoppers say they avoid a particular store because of someone else’s negative experience.

• 31% of customers tell one or more friends about a problem they experienced with a store. But on average, shoppers tell four people about their negative shopping experience.

• Negative word of mouth influences future patronage up to five times more than the person who experienced the problem first-hand due to the Telephone Game Effect, meaning that the orginal problem description is continually embellished as it passes from person to person.

You can either take this two ways:

1. Make sure that EVERY customer is ALWAYS satisfied
2. Make sure that you have a strategy in place for blogging and online PR - clearly the rules are not the same for contingency planning online as offline (for reference, see the children’s book “Mr. Peabody’s Apples” by Madonna - it is VERY relevant in this day and age)

Thanks to www.micropersuasion.com for the original link.