Kelly Kilpatrick offers some helpful tips on how to positively influence your customers and avoid negative publicity online.
There’s a lot to be said about the state of affairs of online businesses today – they get a ton of free publicity, both the positive and the negative kinds, thanks to the proliferation of social networking sites and blogs on the Internet. It seems that everyone is keen to share his or her take of just about anything and everything. No issue is taboo, no tradition too sacred to be made fun or criticized. And so we have a new breed of customers who are willing to air their grievances, whether real or perceived, in public, little thinking of the consequences of their actions.
Online businesses are sometimes ruined by the nature of these criticisms, especially if they’re made by people with considerable clout online and if they’re made by one too many people. There are times when a company starts its own blog or Twitter account to monitor and respond to people making negative comments about them, trying to minimize the damage before it’s too late. But the World Wide Web is an endless ocean, and the task of monitoring every single bit of information or misinformation is harder than finding a needle in a haystack, and this is why companies should focus on taking a different route in tackling disgruntled customers:
- Trying to please everyone is a huge mistake: Businesses must realize that if they’re going to try to please each and every person who is relevant to them in some aspect or the other, they’re going to end up pleasing nobody. The focus should instead lie on addressing faults at the very beginning, to make sure that they do not happen. Prevention is after all better than acure, so by making sure the customer is happy when he or she completes a transaction with you, you could save yourself loads of trouble.
- Knowing your faults is an asset: It’s ok to make mistakes; what’s not ok is to ignore those mistakes or not admit them as your own. Once you acknowledge that an error has occurred, you’re automatically looking to rectify the error, which is a positive task. But as long as you don’t admit to the mistake, you’re never going to set things right. You don’t have to cry about spilt milk, but if you close your eyes and hope it will disappear by itself instead of cleaning it up, you’re fooling only yourself.
- Influence your customers positively: The best way to do this is to provide quality goods and services at the right prices. Customers are not going to grumble even if you do charge a bit more than the competition as long as they know they’re getting a premium product or service. They also expect to be treated with respect and honesty, so even if you’re initially successful using underhand tactics, it’s a situation that’s not going to last long.
- Do the unexpected: Give your customers reasons to stay with you, especially when the competition is trying its best to lure them away. You don’t have to go out of your way to ensure that they remain loyal to you, a few small courtesies work wonders too. A friend of mine was both pleased and surprised when a customer service agent of a company whose services she subscribed to called her just to thank her for using their products. There was no marketing pitch and no pressure, just a random courtesy call.
This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of web learning versus class learning. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com.
