Bridging the Attitude Behaviour Gap

Everyone knows, retaining customers is preferable to losing them and trying to acquire new ones… but what are companies doing in this regard? Easier said than done?

At Fizzback we don’t only collect, capture, and interpret customer feedback; we also work with clients to get the most out of their customer engagement solution. We do this by conducting in depth analysis of root causes, and then matching customer satisfaction results and threats to switch to a competitor with actual changes in behaviours. As consumers, what we want is often different from what we decide to get in terms of products and services. Similarly, threatening to switch does not always mean we will. Threatening is more of an attitude whereas taking one’s business elsewhere is the actual behaviour. Depending on the services/goods in question, the latter could be a difficult and time-consuming process for the consumer but also very costly for the provider.


Currently, just over 10% of Fizzback clients proactively monitor customer threats to switch and contrast this with their subsequent behaviour. This small percentage is due to most companies’ inability to monitor customer behaviours and link these results to the Fizzback solution for various unfortunate reasons. However, best practices examples can be found across a range of industry sectors throughout the globe: from retailers to mobile carriers to shipping and logistics providers.

A part of the customer retention process is identifying comments we could call “false positives” and “false negatives”: these are customers who leave even when expressing high or standard satisfaction levels and those who threaten to leave but do not, respectively. Quantitative scores and overt threats (e.g., “I’m tired of this poor service and am switching to X”) do not tell the whole story. In-depth quantitative analysis can pick out less obvious threats (“false positives”) and ignore false alarms (“false negatives”). In a nutshell, Fizzback customers can balance comprehensive analysis and streamline efforts to retain dissatisfied customers (more or less evident). What is your business doing to optimise your customer retention strategy? Are you maximising the benefits of your customer engagement solution by conducting nuanced analysis on the back of it?

Momchil Metodiev