By Mickael Bentz, Adobe Campaign
Social media has provided a digital megaphone for disgruntled customers to publicly shame your business and draw attention to a negative experience. You can already feel your ears burning as the news hits social media, possibly going viral. People start talking about you, and not in a good way. Disaster, right?
Not necessarily. In fact, this could be an opportunity to win a dedicated proponent and social ambassador. Oftentimes, the most critical of customers can be your greatest advocates after working with them to turn around their situation. So, how do we go about this?
1. Eliminate Negative Customer Experience
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This may seem obvious, but deserves some explaining. Customers will occasionally have a problem, whether it’s your fault or theirs. A great brand prepares for this and solves the problem before it turns into a negative situation. That’s what Apple’s Genius Bar is all about. They make it simple to get your technology replaced or repaired.
Then there’s Zappos. They go beyond free shipping to you, and actually pay for shipping their merchandise back, no questions asked. That way, if you don’t like something, you changed your mind or you just wanted to compare several products to each other and feel how they fit, it’s simple and free to browse. These, and other brands, tackle the problem of negative feedback very aggressively, doing their best to prevent it before it ever arises.
Tip: Whether you follow Apple’s and Zappos’ lead, or take a slightly different path, work with objective third-party sources and the customer service team to identify any and all points of friction in your customer’s journey and try to eliminate them. This is true for their purchase, but even more importantly, for their attempts to return merchandise or get help with problems.
2. Avoid Breaking Up The Relationship
It’s a given that reasonable people will disagree, and even a loving couple will have fights. The important part is not to create a utopia where none of your customers will ever have a problem with you, your products, or your brand. That’s an impossible goal. Instead, the best brands take a more pragmatic approach, managing such problems in a way that avoids breaking up the relationship completely.
Marriage counselors know that the best predictors of a marriage’s future is not how often the couple fights, but rather how they manage their fights. Do they stay respectful? Do they avoid hurtful language? Most importantly, do they maintain open lines of communications?
Tips: If your customer is unhappy with a product, give him a way to rate it at whatever level he feels appropriate, even if you don’t like it. Face it, if you don’t give him a place to post that review, he’ll find other venues you like even less.
If a visitor to your web site isn’t happy, let her reach a feedback box to tell you about it in no more than three clicks (one click is much better). Your first step here is to carry out an audit now to see how easy it is to reach such a feedback box. Do the same for your apps.
The critical next step is to audit and make sure that data always reaches someone empowered to respond to address the concern, and is also connected to the customer’s profile so it isn’t lost. This includes data from web analytics, rating solutions, e-Commerce solutions, customer service solutions, and any other source you can think of.
Make it very easy for customers to reach a single, detailed, cross-channel preference center where they can manage their preferences as to what forms of communication work for them, on what topics and with what frequency. This is true for emails, push notifications, SMS, direct mail, ads and marketing calls. The best way to do this is through a detailed cross-channel preference center
Consider implementing personalized campaigns triggered by “posted complaint” to make your brand more customer-centric.
3. An Opportunity To Surprise And Delight
The most important thing is when someone complains, they give you an opportunity to positively surprise and even delight them. If you provide great value to your customer at this moment, you win big. Not only will you resolve her upset, you’ll likely turn her from an irate customer into a dedicated ambassador.
Tip: Consider providing complaining customers with special treatment. Perhaps not all of them; maybe just your most loyal customers or even random ones. Perhaps resolve reasonable complaints in a simple way and then be overgenerous for others. Sure, this costs more, but considered as marketing, it probably has the highest ROI potential of any other marketing effort you’re already paying for. Do the math, then test and adjust.
Takeaway
None of us enjoys hearing complaints about our business or the things we do. However, if you can change how you relate to customer complaints and instead see them as an opportunity to engage and delight them, you’ll achieve what many of the best customer service departments always request: If you’re delighted with us, tell your friends; if you’re upset, tell us.
Mickael Bentz is a Product Marketing Manager at Adobe Campaign. He came to Adobe via the Neolane acquisition in 2013, specializing in the integration of Adobe Campaign with other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions: AEM, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Media Optimizer and Adobe Social.
