Now that you’ve fired your brand reputation management agency, you may wonder, what’s next ?
Brand reputation management, in my opinion, is closely coupled with customer satisfaction. To me, a negative review translates to an unsatisfied customer. Keep your customers happy and brand reputation will automatically follow. For now, lets leave aside the possibility that some of the negative reviews may be coming from competitors and pranksters.
The first and the most significant step in this whole process is to accept the fact that your company is far from perfect. There’s always something broken – be it your product, be it your service or be it your customer support. If customer’s are complaining, then its a definite indication that somewhere, something is flawed, in your otherwise successful company.
Its essential that you come to terms with this, because only then, will you be able to give a positive spin on negative feedback from customers. The way I see it, you should view negative feedback and customer complaints as constructive criticism.
1) Who is complaining about my product and what are they complaining about ?
To begin the quest of brand reputation management, you need to first gather data on who is negatively reviewing your product and what are they complaining about.
Use Google search, Google Blog search, Technorati to identify the issues being raised with your product. Create Google Alerts for your brand so that each time a reference is made to your brand (good or bad), you are alerted about it. Sign up on sites like Mouthshut.com and collect data on why users are “cribbing” about your brand. Familiarize yourself with Twitter, signup for an account, and search for mentions of your brand. Setup alerts for Twitter just like you did with Google Alerts.
Once you have all this data collected, analyze it to identify the most common issues being raised by your customers. Share this information with your product managers and execs. Negative reviews enable you to close the feedback loop between concept/development and the real world usage of your product.
Now that you have the most common issues listed, revisit your product and try to locate if anything is really broken. If so many users are complaining about account registration, probably this component is broken somewhere ? Are refunds not getting processed correctly ? Probably, there’s some problem with the payment module or the payment gateway ?
Who knows, this process might actually reveal a feature that was previously overlooked by your team ? Take any corrective action that might be necessary and most importantly, reach out to some of the users who complained about the feature / aspect and inform them that the problem has now been resolved.
2) What can I do to protect my brand reputation ?
The very reason why users are leaving negative feedback on other “cribbing websites” is because you have not provided them any channels to voice their complaints directly to you. Yes, you have the standard 800 number, but seriously – who has the time & patience to sit through the series of automated messages ? But we provide an email address too !! Yeah, and when was the last time you accessed it ?
My suggestion to you would be to start a company blog. This enables a direct, two way communication channel with the customers, who can leave their feedback and suggestions via comments. ClearTrip has been doing this successfully for a long time now and I’m sure they’re reaping the rewards too. Be frank and open on the blog, without treading into confidential matters. Announce any known maintainence downtimes via the blog. If you’re aware of a particular, unresolved issue, share it with your customers.
At the same time, keep doing the steps mentioned in the earlier point as well. Reach out to customers who are leaving negative feedback about your product. Just a simple message like
“Hi, My name is ___. I work with the customer service department at ___. I read about your experience and wanted to reach out to you and try to get your issue resolved. Thanks, ___ “. Attach the company blog url into the message signature.
Trust me, just this simple message can work wonders towards the customer satisfaction. Treat each negative review like a genuine complaint, irrespective of the fact that the user might just be a prankset/competitor.
Customer service / support is highly underestimated and undermined most of the times. On the contrary, I believe customer service is crucial to the success of any business, and can work wonders in terms of customer loyalty and word-of-mouth.
As I end this post, I’d like to link to some wonderful examples of customer service zealots – how they’ve mastered the art and how their brand is reaping the rewards.
Customer satisfaction is the Key for all the business locks