Welcome to part 2.5 of our 3 part series on customer feedback. It’s been a while since we’ve touched upon our multi-piece blog post, but you should have an understanding of how to break down silos and value feedback in your organization. Now it’s time to get our hands dirty, and learn how to respond when customers talk to you.
“Congratulations (brand name here), you’ve lost another customer. Make that two customers, plus the ones I encourage to go elsewhere.
Does your job involve talking to customers? Have you ever read something like this about your brand? Heck, if you’ve ever read a blog comment, chances are you’ve come across a string of expletives and angry wit like this. A simple fact is inevitable: not all your customers will like you. The old motto my father taught me of, “A happy customer will tell one person about you, but an unhappy customer will tell ten” no longer applies. An unhappy customer or bystander has the potential to reach hundreds of thousands. The fate of the tailspin lays in your response. However, it’s not as scary as you may think.
If you’ve never responded to a customer who is so frustrated, angry, or livid about something your product or service did or didn’t do it can be a frightening first step. Put those fears aside, take the plunge, reach out and you’ll learn a comforting lesson: by simply acknowledging you’ve heard what they have to say and will do something about it will help mollify the frustration. In best-case scenarios it can lead to positive word-of-mouth. In my former job as leader of the TurboTax Inner Circle, not a week passed without hearing a once pissed-off customer respond with “Oh hey, thanks. I didn’t really expect anyone to respond to me.” Eventually, building this communication with customers manifests itself in collaboration and co-creation, but we’ll touch upon that in our final post.
My former colleague, a wiz at all things related to human behavior, taught the best way to respond is applying the Golden Rule. If you were the one who wrote the comment, how would you want to be treated? You would want someone to listen, tell you the truth, do something about it, and treat you with respect. Be honest, clear, and add a giant dose of empathy to ameliorate the situation and pave your way to a happy customer. Let’s take a few examples.
We’ll start with the opening customer response. Here’s how a customer engagement star from my former team replied:
What did she do right? From my standpoint, the “Uh oh” admits error on our part and makes her sound like a human, which is great because in fact she is a human and not just a corporate drone. The “we’d like to make it right” facilitates empathy, and the question back to the customer opens the door diagnose the issue and get the customer some help. The back and forth ran it’s course and at the end of the exchange, the customer sent a happy tweet sharing the word-of-mouth love.
Here’s another example from my former life as an Intuit employee:
For the most part this response is good – it’s clear and honest. However, I am missing a key piece: empathy. If I were to have thrown in, “I’m really sorry the beta didn’t meet your expectations,” it would have put me in a better place in engaging the customers than the dual “thank you” given. Hopefully these examples and information will help you with your own customer engagement.
However, not all customer feedback is negative. Customers often want to give you kudos for positive experiences too. Next, we’ll cover what to do with the positive and customers that (gasp!) give you ideas that can lead to co-creation.