The best thing a customer can do for your business is give you feedback — good or bad. The reality is that bad feedback greatly outnumbers good feedback. It’s just human nature. We love to complain when something doesn’t go right, and are often too busy to go to the effort to tell someone that something does go right. Even when complaints are justified, the business sometimes never hears them because the customer voiced his or her opinion in a private medium, such as telling a friend how awful the service in the restaurant was, and never giving the business a change to make it right. Word of mouth works for negative feedback even more powerfully than positive.
Mistakes happen. But even beyond mistakes, customers are a business owner’s objective barometer for knowing how well products and services are received. I’ve developed a mantra lately to help me remember this: you can’t argue with perception.
Social media provides unprecedented opportunities to listen in on some of those private complaints from customers that otherwise would never make it back to the business. You should make an effort to respond quickly to a complaint and do so publicly so that others reading the complaint can also benefit from your response. Think of it this way: the complaint will be out there whether or not you respond, so you’d better do something about it.
For large companies, the major cultural shift needed to effectively and genuinely reach customers through these channels may be more difficult than a small company who can do it with one or two people. The rules are the same in either case:
- Engage people on their own turf. They’ll be impressed when you show up unexpectedly to help them solve their problem.
- As with all customer service, keep your cool and “take the high road” whenever you can. Don’t get sucked into meaningless and unrelated tirades.
- Remember how hard it is to control tone through text-based mediums such as email. Lean on the side of being extra nice.
- Try to put a positive spin on the problem, so long as it’s genuine. Talk about future plans to remedy it.
- Don’t discount suggestions, but also don’t over-commit to adding everything people request.
A few years ago Microsoft was getting a lot of public flak about its open source software initiatives. They stayed strong, responding to the comments on their blogs and others, and over a period of several months began to sway the tone of the comments. Eventually the community actually started sticking up for them. This took a lot of time and effort, but it helped to “humanize” Microsoft.
Comparing social media campaigns from Target and Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart failed so miserably that they chose to bow out not-so-gracefully in the face of hundreds of negative comments from students looking for roommates. If they’d stuck it out, I imagine they might have been able to turn it around or save face. Target got their campaign right from the start, creating a “party” for discussing dorm survival, which speaks to the culture and brand perception of the companies going into the campaigns.
The bottom line is to be true to your brand, your service, your customers, and your mistakes. The customer is not always right, but they always have the right to complain. Listening and responding will save you a lot of trouble down the road and probably lead to more business in the short term.
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