How to Deal With Negative Customer Reviews
By Shama KabaniWhen I get a phone call from a retailer, it’s often from someone who feels victimized by a negative consumer-written review. Social media has given a voice to anyone who wants to attack your business, and there are people out there who seem to revel in attacking for any reason — or no reason at all.
If your brand gets bashed in an online forum, respond publicly, honestly and as quickly as possible. Don’t even think about creating an alias; you'll get caught, and it will cause more damage to your reputation.
First, check the facts. Is this person a customer? A former or current employee? A competitor spreading rumors? Once you know the facts, offer to resolve any issues personally via email or telephone.
If you can, take the specific discussion offline. Then, as soon as it's resolved, go back to the site where the negative review was posted and post an honest explanation of what was done to rectify the issue. If you can’t identify the person and you're not sure the complaint is valid, post your policy on the subject and offer to resolve the issue.
Remember what your mother said: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. If other people post personal attacks, take the high road. Never sink to their level.
Most importantly, rally the troops. Encourage friends and satisfied customers or clients to post positive reviews. (Ideally, this happens long before the first negative posting happens. But in the real world, do it as soon as you can if you didn’t get there before a negative posting occurred.)
Reaching out to satisfied customers and asking them for permission to share their comments and experiences can transform social media into a powerful marketing tool that will have a positive impact on your bottom line. There are two parts to transforming a negative online review into a positive marketing tool:
1. You have to do a good job. If your service or product just doesn’t deliver, you're out of luck. You can’t transform a bad experience into an attraction tool. Let’s say you sell a blender and it breaks. A customer tries to return it, but your overworked employee says you just don’t take returns. This isn't an experience you want amplified.
On the other hand, if you do a great job, it makes for the perfect story. One of our clients is K9Cuisine.com, which sells premium dog food online. Nothing too glamorous, but its customer service is amazing. The brand goes above and beyond just delivering orders. If a customer orders regular shipping, K9 Cuisine upgrades it for no extra charge. If a customer says his dog didn’t like a specific brand, they swap it out and help him find something that his dog will like. K9 Cuisine is more than just a dog food seller; it's become a trusted dog nutrition advisor who cares about your four-legged friend.
2. Use success to attract more success. This goes beyond just regular testimonials. Tell your customers’ stories — i.e., what they achieved through your service or product. When K9Cuisine.com receives an email thanking it for helping a family's beloved golden retriever start eating again after a long illness, it asks the customer if they can share their story with others. The story then makes its way onto K9 Cuisine's Facebook and Twitter pages. Soon, lots of people know about how K9Cuisine.com helped. Next time they think about their dog needing dog food, they'll think about K9Cuisine.com. And if they have a great experience, they may tell their friends. The cycle continues.
Becoming an active part of the conversation that's already taking place amongst your customers, employees, prospects and competitors is the best way to prevent negative comments from taking over your online reputation. This is especially critical for cross-channel retail businesses, where customer service truly is king.
It’s no longer a question of whether social media is going to affect your business, it's how. The only question now is when are you going to take charge of your own online reputation?
Shama Kabani is president of The Marketing Zen Group, and author of "The Zen of Social Media Marketing." Reach Shama on Twitter.
How to Prepare Your Website for Peak Traffic
By Matthew PoepselImagine it’s Black Friday, when all of the sudden … boom! Your most critical web application goes awry, bringing your e-commerce operation to a screeching halt on the very day flawless performance is needed most. Think it can’t happen? Think again …
Heavy traffic volumes brought on by peak sales periods can put even the most battle-tested websites and applications to the test. To make matters worse, missteps almost always seem to happen at times when businesses have the most to gain — or lose. A recent survey from my firm Gomez found that a third of online shoppers had a bad experience (e.g., slow downloads, frequent user errors and/or transaction problems) on a retail website last holiday season.
Don’t think that holiday shoppers are a forgiving bunch, either. These same online shoppers report little tolerance for poor web performance, even during periods of peak traffic when they realize that your site is likely inundated with visitors. According to the Gomez survey, 67 percent of consumers said they expect websites to work well regardless of how many visitors a site may have at any given time. In addition, 78 percent of respondents indicated they'll readily switch to a competitor’s site if they encounter slowdowns, errors or transaction problems.
Providing exceptional web performance during peak sales periods can be challenging because organizations are expected to ensure scalability across an extremely wide range of application and infrastructure elements, including those that lie beyond companies’ firewalls. Today’s feature-rich websites and applications include components, content and services delivered not just from inside data centers, but from a number of third-party providers. For example, an online storefront may include shopping carts, search engines, user reviews and analytics all from specialized third-party providers.
In addition to third-party services, your applications likely traverse a complex delivery path that may include internet service providers, content delivery networks, desktops, mobile devices and browsers en route to anxious end users around the world.
Traditional, inside-the-firewall testing tools remain popular with Q&A and testing professionals. Unfortunately, these tools are built around an antiquated philosophy of generating load and measuring performance behind the firewall. This kind of internal testing only tells testers part of the story, because it only identifies problems rooted in a data center. Your end users don't live in data centers, of course. They’re located around the world, at the end of a long and complex web application delivery chain.
The key to load testing today’s modern websites and applications is to measure from the perspective of end users at the internet’s core and at its edges. Both are meaningful vantage points for understanding the true end user experience, and not just a lesser proxy of that experience. A winning approach is to apply load from the cloud along with load generated from real end users’ desktops and devices around the world.
With this combined approach, organizations can more accurately identify which end user segments are likely to experience a bottom line-risking performance degradation. With a more appropriate end user-oriented testing approach, IT professionals can more quickly identify, isolate and resolve application issues and provide better value to their organizations. Bring on the crowds!
Matthew Poepsel is vice president of performance strategies at Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware. Reach Mathew at mpoepsel@gomez.com.
5 Ways to Optimize Live Chat on Your Website
By Steve Castro-MillerLike the old data mining gem that found people regularly purchase beer and diapers together — sometimes commonalities can be hard to see. For websites across a diverse array of product categories, live chat is a common thread of success. A recent survey my firm conducted of more than 1,000 U.S.-based online shoppers found that 56 percent of respondents said live chat positively influenced them to make a purchase.
When the data is cut by the types of retailers frequented by the sample, live chat’s influence over purchase intent is even higher. Consider the following:
- hardware/home improvement (65 percent);
- health/beauty (63 percent);
- office supplies (62 percent);
- computers/electronics (60 percent);
- flowers/gifts (60 percent);
- jewelry (59 percent);
- food/drug (59 percent);
- housewares/appliances/furnishings (58 percent); and
- sporting goods (58 percent).
Here are five tips to help any e-commerce site maximize the benefit of live chat:
- Know the demographics of your visitors. The survey results showed a link between chatters (i.e., shoppers who’ve had a live chat before) and certain characteristics. Chatters are more likely to have higher household incomes, be college-educated and older than 30.
- Put live chat in the shopping cart. Eighty-five percent of chatters indicated that they were likely to initiate a chat session if they experienced trouble during checkout. Seventy-one percent of nonchatters said the same thing. If you’ve succeeded in getting them into the cart, live chat can keep them there.
- Invite visitors to chat. Contrary to the belief that proactive chat invitations are annoying to potential customers, more than half of all survey participants were receptive to proactive chat invitations. Research also found that shoppers from the categories mentioned above were even more receptive. Sixty-three percent of jewelry shoppers were receptive to being proactively invited, for example.
- Don’t fake it. An overwhelming majority (82 percent) of respondents said that if they’re going to engage in live chat, it needs to be with a live human being, not an automated bot.
- Use incentives and on-site reminders to highlight chat availability. Respondents indicated that they’d be more willing to initiate a chat if there were special incentives (e.g., free shipping) for doing so, reminders that live chat was available (e.g., a posted 800 number) and approximate wait times on-site for each communication method.
“From my perspective, we’ve definitely benefited as a result of implementing live chat on our website four years ago,” said Osher Karnowsky, general manager of Jomashop, an online retailer of luxury goods such as watches, fine writing instruments, handbags and luxury crystal, in a Bold Software press release. “Live chat enables us to really enhance the customer shopping experience, and we’ve seen increased customer satisfaction, a higher rate of conversions and higher value orders as a result. For me, live chat is a ‘must have’ these days, not just a ‘nice to have.’”
Across all website categories, consumer-based research shows that live chat is a tool capable of driving sales and enhancing customer service.
Steve Castro-Miller is president and CEO of Bold Software, a web communication tools provider. Reach Steve at steve@boldsoft.com.
7 Ways to Grow Your Brand in a Down Economy
By Jim GilbertI’m not really big on self-promotion or self-congratulations — especially here in my column. However, I'm quite pleased to “admit” that one of the companies I work for has made Inc. magazine's fastest growing companies in America list.
So, what does it take to make the list? While it’s not Inc.’s criteria, I’ll tell you from my perspective what you and your company need to do to get there.
But before I do, let me tell you a bit about the company in question. The Fresh Diet was founded in 2005 in classic entrepreneurial style — in the kitchen of CEO Zalmi Duchman with Executive Chef Yosef Schwartz. The company creates gourmet meals that are healthy, portion controlled and delicious (Chef Yos is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef). The meals are prepared fresh and hand-delivered to clients’ homes every day.
For this luxury (or is it?), customers dish out about $35 a day (most order a month's worth of Fresh Diet meals at a time — about $1,100).
So, how can your company follow in The Fresh Diet's footsteps and make Inc.'s 500 list? Here are seven ways how:
What Your Business Can Learn From the JetBlue Flight Attendant's Meltdown
By JoAnna BrandiWhen Steven Slater jumped out of his own JetBlue airplane earlier this month using the emergency chute, he did more than raise eyebrows. He raised awareness. He’s America’s latest folk hero and T-shirt celeb. With cries of “Get two beers and jump,” disgruntled and dissatisfied employees everywhere are overlooking his rude, illegal and dangerous behavior in favor of cheering him on in his “escape” from the world of work.
He gave voice to what apparently some can only hope to aspire to — the ability to escape from a situation in which they face fear, abuse, harassment, neglect and/or starvation of their spirit every day.
I’ve gotten some flak for suggesting that bad bosses and rude customers have combined to put more pressure on people today than ever before. Maybe I should soften that opinion and say that business and economic conditions have put so much pressure on people that they’re readily heralding Slater as their “hero.”
For the most part, I think employees have done what they’ve been asked to do. “There's no question the existing workforce is producing more with less,'' says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist for IHS Global Insight.
But the pressure doesn’t let up. Bosses, under pressure from their bosses and the shareholders who want fast profits, are often living in fear and revert to fear-mongering tactics to squeeze more from their employees. “Be thankful you have a job” isn't the best way to thank an employee for their extra effort.
Here’s my concern … and it should be yours, too. Many workers, frustrated, bored, angry or just living in fear, won’t leave quite as dramatically as JetBlue’s Slater. But they will leave. Emotionally, they'll leave themselves at home, impacting your ability to reach your goals of “wowing” your customers.
Physically, they'll do damage to your brand by saying things to customers that shouldn’t be shared. In the past several weeks, I've heard many “here’s how it really is around here” secrets from employees upset with their own inability to solve my problem quickly. Ouch.
How can you use the Slidin’ Slater incident to start a lively dialog in your company about how working conditions impact employees’ abilities to take care of customers and feel good about work? How can you unearth peoples’ real feelings, clear the air — hey, we’re all frustrated with this economy! — and move in the direction of creativity and positivity?
Don’t take the chance that key members of your team are getting ready to check out on you. Be proactive and use this incident as an opportunity to broach the least discussed and most important topic in your company — your culture.