BLOGS CHANGE THE EQUATION

Whether the negative experience is a major one or a minor one, it has still happened. In the world before blogs, those negative experiences would be told to a few friends and, if it was bad enough, those friends would tell other friends. Experiences such as customers finding a dead rat in a new couch, having to wait three weeks for a new phone hookup, or finding out about corruption in your company may go even further: to the press. Generally speaking, though, most bad experiences before blogs were confined to groups of roughly a dozen people. They would affect your bottom line, but not to a degree that would actually hurt your business. With the advent of the Internet, and blogs in particular, customers now have a completely different kind of influence. Thanks to the visibility of blogs, the audience that bloggers naturally gain, and the ease of publishing new posts, customers who have negative experiences can now broadcast that to hundreds or even thousands of their readers instead of just 10 or 12 of their friends. Add to that the bloggers’ propensity to link to other sites, and even minor customer service issues may be seen by thousands of people, while major lapses in service that would never have been picked up by the mainstream media are suddenly viewable to millions, simply because so many people are now reading blogs.

RESPONDING TO NEGATIVITY: YOUR CHOICE

When you are responding to negativity, you have a choice: you can ether create another negative experience for your customer and likely lose him or her forever, or you can create a positive experience that could, if nothing else, negate the negative experience. If the positive experience is strong enough, you may gain a happy customer or even a customer evangelist. Even better, by creating a strong positive experience in blogs, you allow other customers to experience it and be influenced by it as well. As negative experiences spread through the blogosphere, so do positive ones. Bloggers love to point out companies who “get blogs,” and examples of companies who not only read blogs, but also respond on them, are few and far enough between that you’ll benefit from a lot of linking and perhaps even more eyeballs than had read the original story of the negative experience. Blogs make negative experiences exponentially more visible, which means that your company needs to be aware of the issues being raised in blogs, needs to be able to respond to them quickly, and needs to make sure the issue is fixed and that the original unhappy customer is made happy. Doing this in the public space can be both scary and dangerous, but there is a power to it that cannot be ignored.

HOW NEGATIVITY LOOKS

To understand how to deal with negativity that arises in blogs, you must first understand what that negativity looks like, where it can be found, and what type of negativity you are likely to encounter.

CUSTOMER TYPE AND RESPONSE

Back in Article 2, you were introduced to the five types of customers: saboteurs, occasional sufferers, reluctant customers, regular customers, and evangelists. Each of these customers is created based on his or her negative or positive experiences and, as such, will respond in completely different ways. Each of these types of customers will express their displeasure at negative experiences, but they’ll do it in unique and varyingly passionate ways. More passionately negative customers will generally see any negative experience as reinforcing their perceptions of your company, while generally positive ones will see it as a one-off mistake. Either way, you need to treat these customers with respect, fix the problem, and make them happy. Saboteur A saboteur will treat any negative experience in a “last straw” type of manner and will broadcast the experience as loudly as he or she can. Most saboteurs are simply regular customers who have had either a few too many negative experiences or an overwhelmingly negative one, such as an abusive or criminal experience. These individuals can be expected to post comments whenever they encounter the name of your company, to blog about their experience, and to, at best, be sarcastic whenever they blog about your company in the future. While dealing with saboteur-type customers in blogs can be a challenge, you can realize a huge benefit not only by fixing the problem and making the customer happy, but also by turning him or her into a customer evangelist.

Occasional Sufferers

These types of individuals have had negative experiences with your company. They may or may not blog about their experiences, but they will definitely tell their story whenever someone else has a negative experience with your company, thus amplifying the effect. If they have a blog, they may have blogged about their experience when it happened but are unlikely to bring it up over time. These types of customers are often the types who have run into lapses in process or several lapses in product quality. They are important to the sustainability of your business, because they would normally be regular customers and regular purchasers of your products. Reluctant Customers Reluctant customers typically haven’t had any truly negative experiences with your business, but they haven’t had any truly positive ones, either. They shop at your business when they have to or

when you offer the lowest price, but they feel no sense of commitment to your business. As such, these are the types of people who will be influenced watching you interact with other customers and will easily interpret those positive experiences as reflective of your company. These customers won’t really post negatively or positively about your company in comments or their own blogs, largely because they have nothing overwhelming to say. As a result, it’s difficult to reach out to these customers and push them along the path to becoming evangelists directly, but indirect positive experiences they see will, if nothing else, make them more aware of your business.

Regular Customers

Your regular customers keep your business going. Whether you’re a small-town bakery or a huge box store, your regular customers are likely a significant percentage of your revenue and, as a result, keeping them happy and dealing positively with their negative experiences is key. Regular customers will blog about their negative experiences with businesses at which they enjoy shopping, largely because they don’t expect to have those negative experiences. They expect generally positive ones and, as such, are prime targets for you to make happy. These types of people blog about the positive experience you created and spread the news around in future posts about your company but they wouldn’t necessarily do that with negative experiences.

Evangelists

Your customer evangelists can, and will, change the face of your business. These people may eat at a certain restaurant three times a week, constantly trumpet the works of their favorite authors, and are the kinds of folk who buy only one kind of car because that manufacturer has always exceeded their expectations. Your evangelists will be downright shocked by any negative experiences some will even try and contact you directly about them. It’s important to remember that any negative comment you come across in your searches and travels could be from an evangelist. The worst part of an evangelist’s negative experiences means that those people will quickly progress down to reluctant customers and, if the experience is bad enough, all the way to saboteurs. An unhappy customer is a happy one waiting to happen, a saboteur is an evangelist waiting to happen, and a negative experience with an evangelist is a saboteur waiting to happen. Respond to all of your customers on blogs like they’re evangelists, or potential evangelists.