Social media and the internet have turned customer service into a spectator sport. The ability of disgruntled consumers, or “haters”, to post scathing reviews or complaints online (the more outrageous, the better) is tipping the balance of power from the corporations that produce goods and services to their customers.
Every new social media platform brings with it a fresh crop of haters and trolls (the most persistent and vitriolic adversaries), who seem to be getting louder and more self-righteous thanks to the multiplier effect that comes when posts are shared, liked or retweeted.
Many businesses may be dismayed by this, but a new book is urging businesses to turn each customer comment or complaint into a positive marketing experience, no matter how ghastly it is.
“Answering complaints is quite possibly the single greatest opportunity you have to keep your customers and grow your business,” says Jay Baer, author of Hug Your Haters, which advises companies to respond to every complaint, in every channel, every time, especially on social media, where the world could be watching.
It won’t do, he says, for companies to cut, paste and send the same stock reply to everybody. Each complaint needs a personalised response. To businesses that think they do not have the resources to do this, Mr Baer has a simple answer: they can’t afford not to.
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“It’s a testable proposition,” he says. “It almost always makes business sense. Hugging your haters is not a cost. It’s a profit centre. It makes good business sense.”
Companies, he adds, should treat bad reviews as free market research, in which case the more complaints, the better.
The disgruntled customer who took to social media after eating at the White Castle burger chain may have been doing the company a favour by describing his burger as “the bastard love child of a 7-Eleven microwavable meat patty and the entrail drippings of roadkill left to fester on mid-western highways in the hot July sun”.
Mr Baer advocates responding to such complaints with an apology and an invitation to return for a free meal. He denies that this could amount to feeding the trolls. It is, he insists, a chance to turn lemons into lemonade and an opportunity to be seen by everybody else to care. “Customers are not always right, but they should always be heard.”
Last week, Whole Foods Market took only three hours to withdraw pre-peeled oranges in plastic packaging from its shelves after Nathalie Gordon, a customer from London, tweeted a picture of the product with the pithy comment: “If only nature would find a way to cover these oranges so we didn’t need to waste so much plastic on them.”
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After the remark sparked a minor tweetstorm, Whole Foods tweeted back in reply: “Definitely our mistake. These have been pulled. We hear you, and we will leave them in their natural packaging: the peel.”
Whole Foods Market is not alone. Starbucks responded swiftly this month after an announcement on its Facebook page about changes to its customer loyalty programme attracted around 6,000 negative responses. “Starbucks answered everybody individually who commented on their Facebook page. They used their name. They did not just copy and paste the same reply word for word. That was pretty remarkable,” Mr Baer says.
The business strategist did not set out to write about hugging haters. His initial title was “An Hour or Less”. He hoped to show the importance of speed in responding to online customer comments, but his research showed him that speed alone mattered less than whether companies replied at all.
After conducting a study with the market research company Edison, Mr Baer found that a third of customer complaints went unanswered. “If that is happening on Twitter and Facebook, Yelp and TripAdvisor, then everyone can see you ignoring your customers. Haters are not your problem. Ignoring them is.”
Greg Portell, a partner at AT Kearney, the global consultancy, agrees that companies should be more willing to regard digital messaging about their goods and services as “the canary in the coalmine”, alerting them to problems. Social media complaints also can be “an opportunity to get good press by doing the right thing”. He cites a Cheerios television advert featuring a mixed-race family that provoked a storm of racist remarks on YouTube. Cheerios did not buckle, but issued a statement saying: “There are many kinds of families and we celebrate them all,” a response that generated a torrent of praise for the ad on other social media forums.
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“That had to be pre-planned, they knew they were going to get a reaction,” Mr Portell said. Nonetheless, it worked out well for the company.
Sam Cinquegrani, the founder of ObjectWave, a digital marketing business, says that companies that respond in the right way can do more than merely neutralise bad publicity, they can turn it to their advantage. “The key is to turn a consumer who complains into an advocate for your brand by treating them right. So you can win, even from a negative review by showing you are customer focused.”
Embracing social media complaints may not come naturally to all customer service departments. It should. Research from Forrester shows that, while 80 per cent of businesses say they deliver superior customer service, only 8 per cent of their customers agree. That’s why the most successful hater-huggers are likely to have a competitive advantage.