Seth’s Blog: The complaining customer doesn’t want a refund.
Seth Godin is one of the most insightful writers on the topics of business, management, social media and entrepreneurial-ism. My own experience has been that the angriest customer is your best, most loyal customer, who feels let down. If you give them the respect of listening, while they’re venting and you attempt to address the offending issue in good faith, they will calm down and return, having been satisfied and possibly even given a glowing review to friends (mainly because, sadly, this the exception and not the norm).
My most frustrating time, on the customer service front, was to work with a company that treated customer service as an inconvenience. Anyone who thinks that fobbing off upset customers with a discount coupon for a 10% discount, that 60% of customers are already taking and not allowing them to double-up on it, deserves an entrepreneurial Darwin Award.
It’s always been that you don’t know what connections that an unfamiliar customer has and what they will do when you have to go beyond the usual service. Now, of course, social media has acted as an amplifier for the response to your message. The unimposing person you think is unjustified in “whining” may have 50,000 twitter followers. Effectively responding by just listening to them sympathetically can turn that into a huge positive for your company’s reputation.
