How do you deal with an unhappy customer? Unfortunately there’s no one right answer for that. Factors like your business model, their specific complaint, even the current economic climate all go into determining how you can best put the gruntle back into the disgruntled.
But there are plenty of wrong ways to do it, and plenty of object lessons in how not to behave.
Not surprisingly, these lessons are all Internet-related. There’s danger inherent in the Internet, in that illusory degree of separation and in the way your impulsive typing-and-clicking can spread ‘round the world, and never be taken back.
Customers complain online. We have to accept that fact. Services like Yelp and Epinions make it as easy as can be for consumers to log their good and bad buying experiences. Alas, it’s been proven again and again they’re far more likely to talk about the bad than the good. And as bad as that might seem, it’s often the merchants’ reactions that really do the damage. Consider the evidence:
A one-star Yelp review for a Chicago-based wine-paring class resulted in dueling blog insults, and finally a half-million dollar defamation suit against an internationally renowned oenologist. In an email he accused his customer of acting like a child, but the resulting publicity hurt only him.
In Canada, a restaurateur responded to negative reviews by creating a fake sex site profile for the reviewer. She’s just been convicted of two counts of defamatory libel and will be sentenced later this year.
And perhaps the worst: the owner of an online eyeglass retailer has just been sentenced to four years in prison for stalking, harassing and intimidating critics. He would routinely email and even telephone reviewers, threatening them with his knowledge of their personal information such as home addresses. Amazingly, he was apparently courting bad feedback, under the theory that any online mention at all result in higher search-engine rankings.
How shortsighted. In business, your only real currency is your reputation. Your reputation utterly depends on how you deal with the most challenging situations. Can you win back every unhappy customer? Probably not, but you can certainly extend the effort to try to make things right. In the most extreme cases you can just ignore them. But engaging in a very public war of words (or worse)? That’s something you can’t win, and can never undo.
The C4:
- Try though you might, you can’t make every customer happy. Unhappy customers complain, and in our digital age there’s a very good chance they’ll complain online. Do yourself a favor and accept that fact.
- Resist the urge to engage. Yes, it burns inside to see your business publicly disparaged, especially if you don’t agree with the reviewer’s version of facts. But do you want to play “he said/she said” with the whole world watching?
- Instead, consider your alternatives. Can you turn a negative into a positive? Can you swallow your pride, say Mea Culpa, and make some kind of public effort at reconciliation? It might not feel good, but it’ll look good.
- Failing that, just walk away. Readers of online reviews are willing to take outlying gripes with a grain of salt. Prove your critic wrong by giving stellar service to everyone else who walks through your door. If you engage and say the wrong thing you’ll be tarnished forever. Treat your reputation as currency, and never risk it on a sucker’s bet.
