Filed under: Business, Internet, Blogging, Google, Open Source, AOL
Does your small business listen to customers’ complaints? Do you have a way for customers to get in touch with kudos or complaints? According to Jeff Jarvis, learn how to love the customers who complain by learning how to listen to them. The first way small business should listen now is through online feedback.
Most on the internet enthusiasts know the on the internet suggest Jeff Jarvis’s Dell Hell story. Powerful blogger has hellish customer service experience and tells his story on the web. The world commiserates and the term Dell Hell becomes a metaphor for bad customer service. Cable companies and AOL have had their brands besmirched by bloggers telling their dramas in text, in pics and worse, by viral video. Your product may be the next one reviewed on the web.
If you think this is a challenge only for super-sized businesses, think again. Word-of-mouth is your friend for getting new customers and it’s your worst enemy for losing them. Are you prepared to welcome and respond to on the web complaints from customers? If not, get on the train or be left behind.
There are free different online tools to help you listen to your customers.
- Blog - there are so many free blog platforms that rehashing them seems antiquated. Get a free one and practice. Just don’t forget the small business blogging guidelines.
- Be Social - Hang out where your customers do, on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter (to name a few). Get a space and name it and then spend time there interacting with your customers.
- Feedback - at the least, add a contact form to your Web site. If you don’t have one, get a free one (free might include advertising).
- Virtual Helpdesk - add a virtual helpdesk to your site. If your product requires support, use a system built to do that (not free but good) or take the step to open source helpdesk software here, here and here.
- Talk - get a free chat applet to let you converse online with customers. The easiest way is to use one hosted on another server. See a list of free chat applets here or here. Think about posting a time you’ll be online and send email invitations to your customers for a customer chat.
Follow a successful model. Google’s customer policy is one we use ourselves: Give people what they want, not what you think they want. In most cases, we know more than our customers do about Web technology but if we don’t listen to them and meet their on the web goals, then our Web site will, well, suck, no matter how pretty it is. (Sure, we go beyond what they ask for but always point out exactly where “what they asked for” resides. They want site stats? We give them stats for free but add Google Analytics and send the link to those reports repeatedly and have a handy list of “how to interpret” links to attach.)
Deal with customer complaints by making them part of your growth strategy. You can listen to and then resolve a complaint, but unless you fix the problem that caused it in the first place, you’ve no strategy except a mop and bucket.
When we first instituted our on the web help desk which was designed to track work, billing and ensure that customer problems were resolved (plus keep track of quote requests, the new business we wanted), our less-techie customers couldn’t figure out how to register for free and open a support ticket. After internal incredulity (it seemed so simple to us!), we put a one-page step-by-step guide together to get even the least-geeky client using the system, which was our goal all along. We also provided everyone with a easy script to help customers over the phone. Their real, unvoiced complaint? We over-estimated our customers’ ability to use the “easy” system. We could have trashed it and gone back to the old way - email. Instead, we used their complaints to solve the underlying problem and now 80% of our clients, and all new clients, are using the on the web tracking system.
It is a far better business strategy that your customers complain to you (and you fix the problem) than if they start their own “your-product-sucks.com” site or tell well-read bloggers so they have the ability to tell the entire on the web world just how bad your customer service is. There’s plenty of room in the comments for you to tell your worst - and your ideal - customer service experience. Admission is free.
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