Grow Your Business

By Russell J. White

I’ve always trained my clients that when dealing with an angry customer try to move them to a private place to address their issue because angry customers love to broadcast to an audience.

The days of “a private place” are over thanks to social media and the smart phone power to instantly notify thousands of people in real time about how; you the customer are being dealt with.

The old math used to be that only one of every twenty five customers complained and on average an upset customer would tell 16 other people. So the math used to be for every complaint you received, roughly 400 people would hear about your bad service.

Currently, I have over 6800 twitter followers, 900 facebook friends and 250 facebook fans. That is 7,950 people a click away. I also have a blog as do millions of other potential complaining customers. My numbers are by no means the top of the heap. In fact, I would say for those involved in social media, they would be slightly above average.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume my numbers are average and that one complaint still represents 24 other people just as upset who didn’t bother to let you know.  Under the new math of social media, for every complaint you receive, roughly (7950 X 25) 198,750 will hear about your bad service! Whoa!

Add in the viral nature of retweeting on twitter and reposting on facebook and suddenly you have hundreds of thousands of people talking about your bad service. (Just ask Toyota)

Organizations used to have special handling for people of influence to ensure they never spread the bad word. Why? Because people of influence used to have a network that listened to their advice and their word would carry significant weight on the decisions of others. Today social media is giving everyone that type of network.

Recently, my wife and I were told by the vet that our young dog had to have hip surgery for hip dysplasia. She recommended another vet who does this type of work. Being the researchers that we are we found the recommended vet was actually the ex-husband of our current vet. My first thought was, “Was this part of the settlement agreement that she would refer all surgeries to him?” Further investigation was required.

Thankfully we found a website filled with customer recommendations about the great job he did on other dog surgeries. That was what I wanted to read before letting him cut on my poochie.

Customer influence is real and with current technology customers have vast influential power. Yelp, CitySearch and Yahoo all provide the opportunity to post reviews. The trend of search engines is to start using individual networks instead of the mythical algorithms to list businesses in order on pages complete with comments made from my social media network. When this comes to fruition, the word of the customer will be even more critical to the success of your business.

Therefore, every complaint must receive the best effort and the highest priority, because now customers are enjoying using their new VIP status.