Customer Experience
When was the last time you asked a customer how they felt — right after they interacted with your product, signed up, or completed a service? Or are you mostly relying on the phone to ring, the email to land, the complaint to show up?
Here’s the problem: most unhappy customers will never complain — they’ll just quietly leave. According to one source, 91% of unhappy customers never complain, they simply go away. superoffice.com+2Market Connections+2 Another statistic: for every one customer who voices a complaint, there are about 26 others who say nothing. platform1.cx
And when customers leave without telling you, you’ve lost more than their business — you’ve lost the chance to learn, fix, improve, and retain. Because of this silent majority, waiting for feedback is a risky strategy.
What can you do instead? Be proactive.
- Deploy short customer surveys immediately after key touchpoints — after a purchase, a service call, a product launch or sign-up.
- Trigger feedback requests through automation: when an order is delivered, when a user logs-in for the first time, when a project completes.
- Use tools that integrate into your CRM or service stack so feedback becomes part of your workflow, not an afterthought.
There are platforms like Ask Nicely that help capture this kind of ongoing feedback loop, and companies such as Royal Caribbean Group and Cedar Fair Entertainment Company already send regular surveys to stay ahead of issues rather than respond after the fact.
Here’s something personal: I recently sailed with Royal Caribbean — it was a great trip. One crew member went the extra mile and really made the experience memorable. Had they not sent a survey right as I disembarked, I might never have thought to mention how exceptional he was. On the flip side: on a trip to Knott’s Berry Farm I had a frustrating time due to slow ride loading — thanks to their feedback survey the same day I was able to let them know immediately.
Why this timing matters:
- Feedback is most authentic when the experience is fresh in someone’s mind.
- Automated triggers → higher response rates. For instance: the average email survey response rate is about 24.8%. InMoment
- When you integrate feedback capture into your process, you begin gathering data before issues become chronic and losses too large to recover.
The bottom line? If you are not actively soliciting feedback, you are relying on the minority of outspoken customers — while the silent majority slips away. And you may not even know why until it’s too late.
👉 Ask yourself:
If you were a customer of your own business today, how easy would it be for you to give feedback? How soon after your experience? Would you want to?
If the answer is anything less than “very easy and immediate”, it might be time to rethink your feedback strategy.
Customer Experience Series 2 of 5