“I am writing to complain about
widget I bought from your site other day.”Sell anything and eventually you will be on receiving end of a sentence like this. So how do you turn a disgruntled customer not just into a satisfied one, but – even better - into a powerful advocate for your business?
1. Don’t get angry, don’t act hurt
Reactions are initially emotional. Particularly if you are in a small company or you are owner of business, you may take a complaint as criticism – a personal attack.
What do humans do when attacked? We want to fight back and justify ourselves. We become angry and act hurt. But this is last thing you want to do when interacting with your customers – however difficult they may be sometimes.
So prepare yourself in advance: Read this article and you will know how to turn these situations around, so make a decision right now to receive any negative customer feedback in a positive way. As my mother would say: “Engage brain!”
2. Save sale
Got your feelings under control? Good. Now you are ready to secure your primary objective – saving sale.
Remember: this is a person who has already bought from you. The vast majority of visitors to your site don’t even do that, so just fact that this person has already made a purchase makes them an instant VIP and their business worth fighting for.
How do you it?
1. Prioritize – Remember this sale is a bird in hand. Yes, enquiries from potential customers are important, but remember you already have this person’s money in bank. Not potential money – cold hard cash! So first prioritize disgruntled customer with a speedy response.
2. Be respectful – Remember not to get riled. A polite, calm attitude will go a long way to taking heat out of rhetoric.
3. Be informative – Reply thoroughly to every point that has been made and add any other information you think could be useful. Misunderstanding or a lack of knowledge rather than a problem with product itself is often real issue. Part of being informative is also going out of your way to remind customer about his or her right to return or replace product under your (generous) full satisfaction guarantee. Being up front and positive about this will go a long way to diffuse any concern customer may have about having to wrestle money out of your hands at some point in future.
Apply above methods and chances of securing sale will increase tremendously.
But remember that even if you do lose sale, your positive approach may well have saved customer: Part company on good terms and you retain potential for future sales and have at least neutralized a lot of negative word-of-mouth publicity.
3. Sell more!
Now this might sound crazy, but a disgruntled customer is actually a sales opportunity in disguise. Just think about it for a moment: Perhaps they are unhappy because they did not get what they wanted from their initial purchase.
