Why customers are disappearing

I am not a marketing expert, but I tend to believe that “customers will complain if something is wrong” is nothing more than a belief.

Consider for the beginning the following post. It adequately reflects the fact I would mention: customers will extremely rarely return to software vendors with sufficient complaints, instead they will rather select some other product, i.e. you will just loose the customer knowing nothing about reasons.

Imaging for example you are buying a car. You will visit several dealers and have some test-drives and even have several offers, which you will discuss (making sellers to believe that those are close to a deal). In reality you will buy no more than one car (or even none). Will you go through other car makers’ dealers and explain your choice?
Never

I suppose you are not sо young that it is your first car, so you had another before. BUT, you probably decided to switch to another brand. Will you return to your previous car brand dealer and explain why you have chosen another one?
No

If a dealer will call you will you give them a fair answer? You will likely to give the shortest answer, which rarely will match with the fair one.

The reason is simple: you (the customer) have already decided and you don’t want to spent any more your time for this! The problem is solved and you start to solve another one.

Moreover customers will rarely to return to a producer with complaints right after buying if they don’t expect the producer to fix the ware (in software world - the current release). Have you ever send a feedback to companies like SONY, HP, AEG, Microsoft etc after your discovered that something is user-unfriendly or so? I don’t really believe.

Summarising, if you are designing a product, then don’t make a decision like: let’s do in one or another wait and customers will complain if it is wrong. It is nearly hopeless to expect customers be giving a feedback. It will happen only if you have very good relations with your customer or they have no real choice (nobody else producing something similar).