You have made your product ready and your business began to roll. You start to engage your marketing strategy based on what have been written in the business plan.

A good marketing strategy has always been focused on the customers. Knowing what your customer wants and build your products according to their needs.

The easy part is listening to them. The tricky part is converting what they say to benefits your business.

How would you achieve that?

A customer should have regular access to communicate with a representative from the company.

Open up any communication channels that is available and relevant to your business, whether it is a phone based customer care, a website that able to handle their feedbacks, email communication or social media where you can evaluate their comments.

The key is to focus on what your customers are saying about you.

All these feedbacks will come in the form of criticism, which many businesses avoid. But if it can be converted into benefits, why must it be avoided?

Handling the Bad News

The negative feedback is usually related to customer interaction with the product, service or the company itself. Specifically, they could be:

  • Product didn’t work as planned
  • Customer encounter bad service from company representative such as customer service officer or marketing or sales people

When issue happens, customer will find a way to contact the company to express what he experienced. Be prepared anyway. Evaluate clearly and act fast to provide the best solution.

And don’t forget to keep the case for future improvement.

Handling Angry Customer

Sometimes, we could be dealing with an angry and frustrated customer.

When this happen, make sure things don’t get worse, especially on publicly opened channels such as social media. Company should quickly calm down the angry customers and act fast to solve the problem.

Make sure to be authentic and honest. In the end of the day, a complaining customer just want his problem solved. This is where customer care should work their best with any related department. Customer tends to calm down if he understand his problem is going to get fixed and might forgive the company for what has happen.

Unspoken Issue

There’re customer who never brought up the problem they experience. This is however, the worse a company could get.

Why? Because your company never knows if somewhere, someone experience problems. This type of customer usually never come back to buy any product from your company anymore.

So, how to deal with this?

Your effort might go in starting a customer experience survey. Do this through phone calls or online survey through website or social media. Offer free gift in return.

Conclusion

After all, a business wants to hear good things that go viral.

  • It provides the best products
  • It is problem solver
  • It respects me as a valuable customer
  • I am a loyal customer of the product or company
  • I trust the company

Customer criticism is not something a company should be scared of. It is an opportunity to improve. If you, as a business owner can view criticism this way, you should have big chance in building one of the most valuable company.

Comments to: The Positive Value of Customer Criticism

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