Hug Your Haters
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Hug Your Haters

How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers

Jay Baer
Portfolio, 2016
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Social media outlets give your customers a channel for making public statements about your product or services. “The haters” – incensed customers who let you know how you’ve upset them – can help or hinder your business. Marketing expert Jay Baer cautions that executives who dismiss haters as irrelevant are missing the real issue. Companies that choose to ignore their critics are communicating that they don’t consider their customers important. On the other hand, responding productively to criticism shows everyone that your customers’ perceptions matter to your business. By replying, you can transform critics into boosters. Haters provide a valuable source of information about the issues facing your consumers and a perfect avenue for fixing problems and earning their loyalty. Baer does a masterful job of explaining what haters want and how your business can deal with them. getAbstract recommends his helpful manual to executives, customer-service managers and frontline employees who deal with customers every day.

Summary

Customer Service As a Spectator Sport

With the growth of social media, serving customers has become like a sport. Your customers are the referees who award points for quality of service in a game that you can win or lose. Businesses face intense competition for consumer support. By using feedback from haters and addressing the problems they cite, you can create an advantage your competitors will find hard to emulate: high-quality customer service. Surprisingly, your allies in this contest are the incensed customers who make the effort to let you know you’ve made them angry – “the haters.” You have reason to hug them. Haters’ feedback is an important asset in this battle.

Concerning businesses, 80% believe that they provide superlative customer service. However, only 8% of customers agree. Many businesses offer 21st-century customers the same toll-free telephone call-center service they began offering in the 1970s or the same rounds of email correspondence they launched in the early 1990s. Most firms haven’t altered their customer service routines to keep pace with their customers’ lives or habits. Even though businesses now spend billions of dollars on customer...

About the Author

Convince & Convert president Jay Baer provides consulting services on digital marketing and customer service. He wrote the New York Times bestseller Youtility.

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    P. V. 8 years ago
    Why serving customers is now a sport wherein you can win or lose
    What consumers think of customer service
    How learning to love your critics can turn them into your advocates and do wonders for your business