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Treat Bad Customer Reviews as Good Friends

January 21, 2012 By 1 Comment

 

Bad and good reviewsWhen a customer is disgruntled, the act of solving his problem in a rational and authentic way – meaning not hiding the truth – is an excellent opportunity to turn him into the most loyal customer you ever had.

Does this mean we should mess up as a strategy? Of course not. You know the popular saying in these ‘connected times’: “an unhappy customer will tell xyz (fill in a number) perfect strangers.”

However, our mania about reputation and fear of comments make us forget the basics and often even take wrong decisions as research about “bad” or “negative” customer reviews shows. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, Connected marketing, Customer relationships, Customer service, Research Tagged With: , , , ,

Listen to the Voice of the Customer or Stop Doing Business

November 24, 2011 By 3 Comments

Voice of the customerIn a recent study by MarketTools 34% of executives surveyed stated that they were aware of customers using social media to comment on or complain about their company and/or its products. That’s about one-third of respondents. Great, isn’t it?

It seems some executives realize that the voice of the customer is channel-agnostic and consumers use social media. However, when looking at how the voice of the customer is taken into account, what customer-centricity is partially about, the outcome is quite shocking, yet not surprising anymore: based on this study the voice of the customer most of the time simply seems not taken into account at all. Less than one-fourth of the executives that were aware customers use social media to comment or complain, said their companies always respond to these customers.

When it boils down to customer service, the research found that 23 percent of companies provide it on Facebook, with 12 percent providing customer service and support via Twitter. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, Connected marketing, Customer engagement, Customer relationships, Customer service, Customer-centricity, Research, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Wake Up: Your Customer Does Not Want to Be Your Friend

September 10, 2011 By 2 Comments

look at what the customer wants you to see and understandA (potential) customer wants you to respect him and what he is looking for in every step of his buying journey. He doesn’t want to be your friend, although you should treat him like one. Five questions to answer and discover how customer-centric you really are.

Words are extremely important. They can even make or break you. A word that was playing in my mind all week is ‘social’. Since the advent of “social media”, it often seems as if we believe that marketing, and by extension even society, has become more ‘social’. Don’t think so. Businesses are not social. They just realize that if they don’t listen better and engage in more authentic customer interactions, they are in trouble.

Another word I thought about a lot this week is ‘friend’. There is no universal definition of friendship, everyone experiences it in a different way and distinctive degrees. In a social media and network context, we use the word ‘friend’ a lot, too much in fact. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, Customer engagement, Customer relationships, Customer service, Sales, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Consumers Seek Online Customer Service: Are You Where They Want It?

August 10, 2011 By 4 Comments

online customer service and supportYou always have to be careful with surveys from vendors, selling solutions, about the markets they operate in such as the one I mentioned in my previous post. However, the data regarding customer feedback and customer service often do confirm what we all know: most businesses are not customer-centric across all touch points and don’t act enough upon customer and behavioral insights. Take any “neutral” (what’s in a word?) survey regarding these topics.

People these days want a personal and personalized customer service, and they want to be heard. It’s our jobs to take their input into account and improve our business processes.

Consumers don’t only voice their opinions, thus providing you with crucial data (think about social media monitoring, for example), they also increasingly seek customer service online. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer service Tagged With: , ,

The Artificial Difference Between Community and Customer Service

July 27, 2011 By 2 Comments

customer serviceI just received the daily newsletter of SmartBrief and read a short blog post mentioned in it and written by Richard Millington. The post is about the differences between a “genuine community and a customer service channel” and the need to distinguish between both.

Richard indeed argues that each is unique since “a genuine community effort involves bringing together a group of people who share a strong common interest and building relationships between them”. Every single effort you do, he says, is focused on building those famous relationships between members.

A customer service channel, on the other hand, is aimed at helping customers “who have questions about your products and/or services”. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer relationships, Customer service, Social CRM Tagged With: ,
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