Talking Back to Your Customers – The Web 2.0 Way

Twitter has been getting a ton of complaints lately that stemmed from them having downtime and not adequately reporting the issues or keeping people posted.  The interesting part of this debacle is that most of the complaining wasn’t due to the service being down or extremely slow, but rather because the Twitter team was not utilizing the tools to talk back to their users and acknowlede the problems.  Eventually Twitter realized its wrongdoing and started to update people on Get Satisfaction, their blog and their site. While they managed to control the damage, it was after negative comments hit mainstream and after everyone at TechCrunch to Scobleizer shared negativity and named a replacement. While most doubt that FriendFeed or anyone else will be able to overtake Twitter anytime soon, negative publicity can have a detrimental effect on your product/service. Here is a quick bullet point list of things you can be doing to avoid bad customer experience:

• Blogging – keep a company blog updated with latest news and status updates
• Get Satisfaction – a place for your customers to express their opinion and help you identify bugs. A Suggestion Box 2.0
• Easy access to contact information – let customers know that they can always call, email or mail in their issues, never hide your number
• Respond to complains quickly - never go silent.
• Never deny the obvious – its much better PR to admit your mistakes than to actively deny they exist.

Read on as I touch on some of the points above.

Blogging – The Ultimate Tool to Connect With Your Users

A blog serves a million functions for your company from keeping the customers updated with the latest and greatest happenings to custom feeds for journalists, to engaging the conversation with your users.  First thing to remember is to always keep posting, because a “dead” blog is sometimes indicative of the company losing interest in updating the users.  If you suffer from planned or unplanned outages of your service – never host your blog on the same server farm as your current website.  A lot of times if the site is down, the blog is the first place people look for an update and if you host your blog on the same server as your site which happens to be down, your blog will be down as well.

To start a blog you can take a look at one of our tutorials in the Video Tutorialssection.  There are two types of blogging platforms out there: a hosted solution such as WordPress.com, Typepad or Bloggerand host-it-yourself packages.  If you would rather have complete control over your content and not rely on anyone else for that service, you should check outWordPress.org, Movable Type or even our own blogging platform, Post Zinger(which, by the way, is a clear winner in blogging/podcasting space).  Some hosting providers such as BlueHost (disclosure: it’s our affiliate link) allow you to very quickly install these platforms.

In case you are still not sold on having a blog, keep in mind that they all come with some type of RSS Feed which helps high traffic blog authors to keep tabs on you, and when they see a new interesting feature or a sour customer turned happy they will cover, it bringing the ever important positive coverage of your service. Your blog also allows you to keep the conversation on the site, where you can control it, and while deleting comments and doing weird things will quickly get you very bad rep, you at least have a chance to respond quickly to issues.

If you think you need to be a technical person, that’s not true, there are a ton of tutorials out there and it’s generally a very low barrier of entry to get started.  Pretty much anyone can get their own blog in a matter of minutes and have it customized with your website’s look and feel in a matter of days, if not hours. There are alwayspeople that can set it for you, adding the benefit of their knowledge in the area.

Got Satisfaction?

Get Satisfaction is an up and coming social media feedback site.  A lot of start ups use it as a de facto destination for getting positive and negative feedback about their services.  It can be used as a tool to report bugs, suggest new features or complain about your product’s usability.  It is extremely useful as a feedback tool because the people who write are usually very passionate about your products.  I have seen people write great suggestions, awesome bug reports and generally very articulate reviews.  It can backfire however – if the company isn’t responsive or has terrible customer service through general channels, it will have issues appealing to the social crowd.  Case in point: Comcast. They try, they really do, and in 4 years of having the service I personally had no issues, no problems with customer service, always responsive, always helpful.  Their corporate image, however, has suffered, from the lies about filtering, to terrible overcharging and deceitful pricing models, they leave a foul taste in customers’ mouths. Also, someone over there really needs to fix their dot com site, probably eliminate it all together.

Setting up Satisfaction is pretty straight forward, first you create a company if it does not yet exist, then you claim it through ether email or phone confirmation.  It takes a few days but once you are up and running, it is very simple to manage your company and products, add additional reps and moderate the conversations.

Denial is Not An Answer – Do Not Try to Fool Customers

If you have a problem with your service – be it an unfairly treated customer, a site that is constantly down, or shipping delays on a product launch – acknowledge them, do not let complaining customers escalate it and attract negative attention.  People enjoy ganging up businesses to stand up for the little guy, be it vocal(through Internet or otherwise) or action driven protest (by unsubscribing, switching services, bad mouthing, etc). Blogs like The Consumerist enjoy writing about these incidents and sometimes whole communities dedicated to complaining spring up in protest.  Timing is also everything, and in 9 out of 10 times you will have to make a public response to a lot of these complains, so it’s better to be proactive and responsive before you generate enough bad press to fill a wall. Responding quickly and honestly is the key. This is where Brand Monitoring comes into play, where you are able to notice these incidents quickly, before they manifest themselves into PR disasters. From Twitter to Google Blog Search, companies that pay attention are the ones that end up benefiting from “Happy Customer” stories and positive word of mouth marketing.

Finally, have an easy way to contact you company, a number on every page or at least a clear link to the contact page, responsive service centers and acknowledging emails will go a long way.  Zappos has their customer number on every page, they respond to emails extremely quickly and show care and compassion – clearly the reason for being so successful in online shoe selling business.

Try some of these out or, if you already use these methods successfully, let us know in the comments how they are working out for you!