Why you REALLY need to be worried about negative word-of-mouth

In my Experienceology workshops, I talk about the well-worn statistics of negative word-of-mouth advertising:

A person will tell about 10 other people about their bad experience with you (but only about 5 people if their experience is good)

If 3 customers have a bad experience, and they tell 10 people, you can have 1,000 negative impressions out there.

Only about 1 in 26 people will complain to you.

Forget all that. Because now we have people complaining on the Internet. So one bad encounter is multiplied by the millions. Check out this post by Mark Hurst, founder of Good Experience. One bad experience with Comcast became a YouTube video... yikes.

Technorati Tags: customer experience, customer service, ComCast, YouTube, Mark Hurst