By Dawn Blizard
Your pizza sauce comes from a recipe that’s been in your family for three generations, and the ingredients are locally sourced, organic, and fresh. But some guy on Yelp says it tastes like rodent droppings on cardboard.
You install lawn sprinklers with care and precision, and hire only hardworking factory-certified professionals to assist you. But Angie’s List has you down as “sloppy” and “unreliable,” and you fear it’s reducing demand for your services.
You set up your Facebook page to receive customer comments to boost engagement, but now it’s full of complaints—and they’re petty, mean-spirited, or just plain unfair. You’re starting to feel like your Wall’s been defaced with malicious graffiti.
Your small business’s online presence has never been more important than it is today. If it’s strong, it’ll win you new customers, grow your sales, and build your brand’s reputation. Creating an attractive online platform for your business is cheaper than traditional advertising, and often more effective. But this online platform is more than just your website. It includes everything that’s been said about your company online. You can’t direct or control the entire conversation.
But you can improve your ability to manage it. In fact, you can turn negative reviews into an opportunity to showcase the strength of your commitment to customer service. By doing so, you’ll increase customer retention, bolster your reputation, and differentiate yourself from competitors. It’s cost-effective, and studies have shown this strategy to be astonishingly effective.
Here’s how to turn insults into golden opportunities:
1. Always respond
You might be tempted to ignore the haters posting on your Facebook wall. You may worry that you’ll end up doing further damage to your reputation if you get into an argument. Perhaps you feel that it’s best to handle your critics by refusing to stoop to their level.
But research suggests otherwise: Surveys show that 70% of customers who complain would do business with you again if you were able to resolve their problem. By responding, apologizing, and offering to make it right, you’d actually be able to keep the majority of these customers.
And retaining existing customers is far less expensive than pursuing new ones. Analysis by Bain and Company shows that it costs between five and 25 times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one. A modest increase in customer retention (5%) can boost profits by more than 25%.
The majority of dissatisfied customers do not complain. But those who do are offering your business a second chance. Take advantage of it, and you’ll see the benefits—increased customer satisfaction, retention, and profits.
2. Let your responses reflect business goals, not emotions
Many small business owners make the mistake of thinking that the purpose of social media is communication. For businesses, it’s not. What we gain from using these kinds of media is not so much the ability to share content with our customers as it is the ability to publish and archive a record of what we have shared.