Ten Tips for Comment Response

Here are 10 tips for responding to e-mail or comments successfully:

• Thank them for their feedback. Realize that it took effort both to find you and write a comment or e-mail. It’s important that you respond with thanks instead of anger, annoyance, boredom, or any of the other emotions that are so easy to slip into when dealing directly with people especially angry people.

• Acknowledge the issues. This doesn’t mean you have to say you were wrong when you weren’t; it means you acknowledge that the person has had an issue, and that you will do your best to resolve it.

• Admit where you’ve failed. Admitting failure can be difficult for companies, especially in these days of massive lawsuits and the like. However, being real will not only calm people down, it will likely dissuade further anger.

Solve any problems. Having admitted that someone is upset and admitted any failures on your company’s behalf, solve the problem. People are accustomed to responses such as “That’s our policy” or “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.” You can do better than this.

• Take ownership. Treat the problem as if it were your own. Call in resources as necessary. Note how processes aren’t working and get your company in gear to fix them.

• Respond quickly. Responses in under 24 hours are the most effective. If it’s taking you more than 24 hours to respond to a query, you’re having problems. Responses in under an hour are a conversation, and conversations are powerful vehicles for positive experiences.

• Answer questions. Sometimes, people just want to know a simple answer. Instead of dismissing a question as unimportant (after all, the customer isn’t upset), look at it as an opportunity not only to create a positive experience, but to begin a dialogue with the questioner and start a relationship between that person and your company.

• Be friendly and courteous. Treating customers with the respect they deserve, and treating them with the respect you’d appreciate from others, is central to any customer responses.

• Don’t use form letters. As a rule, people do not like to be told that your time is more precious than theirs. A form letter does exactly that: it says that you didn’t have the time to craft a personal response, so you’ve sent them a canned one. People not only feel disrespected when they receive form letters, it’s almost a betrayal of trust when they come directly to you with an issue in a comment or an e-mail and you dismiss it with a form letter. Be personal. Be real. Be human.

• Follow-up on any issues or questions. It may be that someone isn’t actually having an issue at all. Maybe he or she just has a suggestion or wants to thank you for being so great. Either way, check back with people after a few days or a week to make sure that issues are resolved to their satisfaction, that someone has responded to their suggestion, and that there’s nothing more that needs to be done to create even more positive experiences for them.

Most of these principles are simply common sense good business and customer service practices. Some might be antithetical to your company’s policies, but most likely they are already part of your customer service mentality or they should be. Problem is, sometimes these things don’t transfer onto blog comments or into e-mails related to blog posts, often because customers can be very raw in their responses, something that is difficult to respond to in the best of times. Treat all your customers as people, and they will treat you and your company as a valued part of their life.

RESPONDING ON OTHER BLOGS

Responding to comments on your blog is fairly easy, largely because if you decide to take the conversation into e-mail, you can easily do so. Responding to comments on other blogs is much more difficult, because the only place to respond is in the actual comment postings. As a result, you get only one chance to make an impression that conveys respect and deals with the issues. To set the stage, here are some examples of great responses from companies in blog comments. Here’s a comment made on a blog after a user explained that he couldn’t install QuickArticles (from http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2005/05/intuit_ responds.html):

I’m the QuickArticles Online Edition General Manager as well as the Acting Leader for our Community efforts (another fancy title :-) for QuickArticles customers like yourself. Speaking on behalf of our new team of Community employees, as well as for the good intent within all Intuit employees, your pain and vocal advocacy did not go unnoticed. While I’m not yet involved in fixing this specific problem, I will share that this pain of yours is making the rounds of executives and will be used with many Intuit employees as a powerful example of how Intuit employees can do more right by more of our customers. Again, thank you very much for taking the time to write it down. I believe the power of blogs like yours isn’t so much that it enables people to have a voice that compels companies respond, but that it’s so easily visible to find out the pain in the first place that solving the problem becomes an easier process. While unfortunate that the world works this way today, blogs and people like you move us forward towards a better place. And here’s a comment in response to a user having issues with her site (from www.corante.com/getreal/archives/2005/05/16/ whats_going_on_at_technorati.php#23458):

Kim, please see my comments on your blog. For some reason, we classified your blog as spam and stopped updating it. I reclassified it just now, so you should be seeing your recent posts in our index in a little while. Sorry. Here are some tips for responding to a comment on someone else’s blog:

• Apologize. You don’t necessarily need to say you were wrong, but saying “I apologize that you had to go through this experience” can be enough.

• Ask the commenter to e-mail or phone you. Leaving your contact information means you’ve provided an opportunity for that person to contact you directly. It’s their choice to pursue the matter, and the ball’s in their court.

• If appropriate, leave an explanation as to what happened and what is being done to fix it. This works only if there was a failure on your part that is already being addressed or soon will be addressed. Use this response sparingly. It’s good to get that message out in public, but it’s bad if the situation doesn’t get better eventually (that is, you say something will be fixed and then it isn’t).

HOW NOT TO RESPOND

The story of Joi Ito, a prominent blogger, and SMS.ac, an SMS communications company, is a great example of responding badly to a blogger. Joi, though, is one of the top 10 most popular bloggers on the planet, which makes this an even bigger misstep. Joi had complained about the service SMS.ac was offering. The company’s response? A cease and desist letter! Joi chronicles the story on his blog (http://joi.ito.com/ archives/2005/02/22/letter_from_kevin_b_jones_of_smsac.html) in an open and engaging way. He received more than 70 comments and more than 20 trackbacks (links on other blogs pointing out this story). All considered, more than 200 comments about this issue are spread across various blogs. And what did the letter from the SMS.ac attorneys say?

UNLESS YOU IMMEDIATELY CEASE AND DESIST YOUR ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, YOU WILL BE PROSECUTED

While responding effectively to negative comments can be challenging, as we’ll see in Article 9, a unilateral cease and desist (without any details of the “illegal activity”) probably isn’t the best way to deal with the situation. The key to responding to comments on other blogs is to keep the response short and sweet. Don’t indulge your desire to write a long letter (remember that the typical blog comment is less than 100 words).

RESPONDING DIRECTLY

Since we have already examined how to find other bloggers who are linking to you, you may now be aware of some cases in which a blogger perhaps wasn’t entirely happy with your company, service, or products. These things happen; it’s impossible to be perfect even on the best of days. You can easily find posts about your company; the challenge is to respond to them appropriately and effectively. A blogger’s post is an invitation to dialogue, because bloggers are accustomed to (and value) conversation and relationships. As a result, the single best way to deal with a blogger’s comments is to respond directly to them.

Here is how to respond to a blogger who has written something about your company to which you need to respond:

• Send the blogger an e-mail using the tools outlined in responding to comments and e-mails earlier in the article.

• Offer something that is appropriate, given the blogger’s state of mind. (Later in this article we’ll look at how Intuit offered James Kendrick a free upgrade of its software package.)

• Leave a comment on the post noting that you’ve e-mailed the blogger. This will let others know that you care and are dealing with the issue.

All of the rules of courtesy and respect hold true during this exchange. Some bloggers like to publish the e-mails and letters of companies who contact them, so be aware that this may happen, and be sure to word your letter with that in mind. Don’t see this as a threat bloggers are typically honored when a company responds directly to them (unless the response is a cease and desist letter, of course). At the end of the day, each of these interactions offers you an opportunity to create a positive experience and to lead a blogger to become a passionate evangelist for your company.

CREATE PASSION

All of this talk about creating positive experiences is really all about one thing: turning people from consumers of your product (and therefore takers) into passionate evangelists and customers evangelists (and therefore givers). The process that defines the creation of passionate customer evangelists is an interesting one, as it involves contact with customers as people, positive experiences that reinforce their desire to have a relationship, a reason to be passionate, and a space in which to express that passion. Creating true passion in your customers requires more than them being aware of you and having a positive experience. It even goes beyond a fantastic experience that exceeds their expectations. The key to creating passionate customers is to evoke an emotional response in them and to give them a healthy outlet for that emotion. A public blog should, at a minimum, hit these two points. It must evoke an emotional response and it absolutely has to be a safe location for your customers to convey that emotion.

VALUE YOUR CUSTOMERS

To get to this place, you need to go beyond the typical “customer” mindset. You need to make your customers mean more to you than your business does. As you can see in the following consumer evolution chart, you need to go through a distinct process for your customers to want to participate in your company. Moving from a consumer to customer mentality is important, because consumers are a faceless group whose sole purpose is to spend money. Customers aren’t faceless, but they are still a large nameless group that is hard to pin down. The challenge with consumer evolution is that the changes that are required don’t happen in customers they happen in you. And not only that, but the changes become exponentially more difficult the closer you are to valuing your customers as owners. Moving from a consumer to a customer isn’t too hard, as it’s just a simple change in perspective.

But going from a customer to a person requires that you not only treat each customer as an individual with unique needs, moods, and passions, but that you be prepared to anticipate those needs and respond to them. Valuing your “persons” as contributors takes an even larger step, as it means valuing the input they provide for your company, even (and especially) in ways you don’t like and in places you don’t want them to see. Truly valuing your customers as owners takes even more effort, as it means realizing that they are actually more important than anything else. For you to transform your customers into owners, you need to expend at least 10 times the energy keeping current customers happy that you spend acquiring new customers. Thinking of your customers as owners is very much like how you treat your partner or spouse. If the only way you communicated was via newsletters you left on the fridge or neon signs on the front lawn, how valuable, important, and intimate would your relationship be perceived? Imagine talking to your customers as individuals every day and running important decisions by them. How healthy, valuable, and even (gasp!) profitable would your company become? Every customer would be just as responsible for your success as you are and would be just as prepared to promote your business, passionately advertise what is going on, and think creatively about ways for you to succeed.