How to Turn An Unhappy Customer Into A Brand Advocate |
Posted: November 22, 2018 |
Getting new customers to notice your new venture is a tough, costly and possibly a strenuous hassle. This is true because customers have much higher expectations, are more digitally connected and have endless array of choices. With emerging social media and extensive digital space, online businesses no longer work for customer-centric marketing but rather customer service for competitive advantage. Fortunately, we will provide you with social marketing tips to help you grow your business to help turn a bad situation toward your favor. With extensive internet and social media use, it is of immense importance for companies to develop measures that serve their customers. Any word of mouth, be it positive or negative, that is amplified through social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter and can easily ruin a 5–year reputation of an enterprise within a day. For that reason, social media advertising geared toward B2C must be carefully managed. There are several cases where one dissatisfied customer turned his or her negative experience into a public mess. You definitely would do best to avoid such an experience with your company. The good thing is, you can turn such an unhappy and dissatisfied customer into an overly satisfied client, and make the customer your brand advocate. Every discontented customer holds the potential of becoming your company’s best advocate, a stealth operative and a key referral source for your business. Below are some of the effective ways of turning your unhappy customers into a valuable resource.
Understanding Why Your Client is Angry Before you think of turning an angry customer into a brand advocate, you ought to find out why the client is angry. First, train your customer support team on some human psychology and customer anger management. They should have understanding customers are frustrated with their services. More often, clients’ anger comes from the following two sources;
The company’s support staff should overlook personal insults hauled at them by clients and take this opportunity to address customer needs and meeting their expectations. The team should adopt a way of interacting with angry clients effectively. By gaining control over the customer-support conversation, they create a win-win situation for the company.
Right Ways to Turn Angry Clients into a Brand Advocate To turn the unhappy customers into your brand advocates, craft a holistic approach and a sound customer service strategy. Some of the proven ways include the following. 1. Listen and empathize with unhappy clients A key approach of handling an unhappy client is making them feel heard. Understand the situation and avoid the natural reaction to anger, which is being defensive. Bearing this in mind, your goal should be to listen to your customer first before trying to solve any problem. Many a time, unhappy clients care about being understood. By listening, you are acknowledging your customer’s reactions, which will change his state of mind. Avoid responding to a dissatisfied customer by trying to find a solution immediately. Whereas this is the overall goal, this can backfire and make the customer more upset. Note that an angry or unhappy customer is in a highly emotional state. Therefore, the first thing to do is to try to get them in an agreeable state of mind. Listen and empathize with them. 2. Find and mitigate the negative feedback immediately For those in the service industry, all types of feedback probably overwhelm you. In situations where there are large volumes of customer responses, you need to prioritize. This can be done by installing a system that automatically prioritizes cases based on dissatisfaction levels. The sooner you find, prioritize and respond to negative feedbacks, the more likely that you will reduce the risk of negative publicity. In forums such as social media, time moves fast so try your best to avoid these marketing mistakes often made on Twitter and learn how best to respond. 3. Take the opportunity for improvement If you emerge successful with the first step – listening and empathizing with the unhappy customer, take that opportunity, extract insights, and work on them to find a solution in their favor. You will increase the chances of having the customer as a brand advocate by having the customer feel like they influenced the outcome. 4. Communicate with the clients on their own terms For most businesses, setting up automated emails that fire occasionally is the easiest thing to do. Most companies believe this can work effectively in engaging their customers. However, this isn’t true. Emails are great, but their focus shifted long ago. Currently, customers interact with businesses and companies through social media platforms. That said, consider engaging in as many social media platforms as possible. This increases the number of touch points you will have with your customers. Besides the commonly known channels – Facebook and Twitter, consider other mediums such as LinkedIn, Quora, Snapchat and Pinterest. 5. Respond quickly You should have a proactive customer support team that responds to negative comments within 24 hours. If the complaint is simple with an instant resolution, apologize for the issue and document your full resolution in your reply. If you need more information from the customer, your response should reassure them. Invite them for a private chat and assure them that they are in good hands, and your team is working to get the issue resolved. For issues that are long-standing such as product bugs, respond in a reassuring way. Inform them that your team is working to change the situation and keep them apprised of the status. 6. Do everything possible to delight an unhappy customer Without any doubt, some problems are difficult to fix compared to others. For instance, a moving company drops an item belonging to a client when moving or a delivery company misses a critical timeline. In such a case, the problem can’t be undone, but you can find a way to compensate the customer. How you succeed in doing this goes a long way in changing the unhappy customer into your vocal brand ambassador. For such cases, you ought to go out of your way to accommodate the needs of the customer and make them feel important, in control and respected. If possible, you can give the unhappy customer something on top of what they asked for. Delivering a small amount above their expectations can make them feel like your most valued customer. Successfully converting your clients into valued customers dramatically affects your repeat business value. For sure, problems are bound to happen—products can be broken and services occasionally fail. However, how you make up for the inconveniences caused by your staff brings the difference. Making things right distinguishes your services from your competition. Customers will always feel welcomed to come back for your services.
Following up after resolution After doing all that’s necessary to make up for your company’s faults, it is time to check if your client is happy with your services. Therefore, consider reaching out to the customer a couple of days after the incident, just to check in. Even the unhappiest client will certainly appreciate you for taking your time to check on them. This will go a long way in rebuilding trust, and positive customer interaction.
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