Keep Your Customers

 

Complaints. Do you love them?

Haters. Do you hug them?

If you are angry at a business, what do you do? Take to Twitter? Facebook?

Whether angry, annoyed, or frustrated, ignoring customer concerns is impossible in the social media age.

 

 

When the Customer Hates You

But what do you do when a customer hates you?

Jay Baer shares the eye-opening results of an extensive study on customer service in the social age. Yesterday’s techniques are no longer enough.

Jay is a New York Times best-selling author and the founder of Convince & Convert, a strategy consulting firm helping companies gain and keep more customers. Since 1994, he has advised over 700 companies ranging from Caterpillar to Nike. His latest thought provoking book, Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers is a contrarian and modern view of creating extraordinary customer service.

 

 

Why Customer Satisfaction Hasn’t Budged in Decades

You share a statistic that customer satisfaction hasn’t improved since the 1970’s. After all the books, the seminars, the new programs, nothing has changed. Why not? What are companies missing?

Customer service has historically played out in private. So even though companies have always said they emphasized it (nobody says “we deliver shoddy customer service” even when they do) they haven’t truly HAD to emphasize it. And doing it well is complex and somewhat expensive in the short term. So nothing has ever really changed. But now, customer service is becoming a spectator sport, and the truths of good vs. bad customer service are out in the open and impacting buying decisions.

 

 

Let’s say you are about to deal with a customer complaint. How do you get in the right mindset?

Don’t take it personally. Remember that the customer is using THEIR time to try to tell you how to make your company better. And remember that you don’t know what the customer has been through. And then embrace that answering a complaint increases customer advocacy, every time.

 

 

Social media has given on-stage haters a platform like never before. Businesses were not prepared. What’s the first piece of Jay Baer advice you usually give a business?

This may be a paradox, but our advice at Convince & Convert to companies looking to improve their social media customer service is to first make sure their offstage customer service is outstanding. If you’re not great at phone and email, all you’re going to do is push people from those channels to social media and back again. Be a great walker before you run!

5 Obstacles to Great Customer Service