Dealing With Unhappy Customers: What Social Marketers Need to Know

Does your business respond to customers via social media?

Are you prepared to deal with upset customers?

To discover how to turn unhappy customers into happy fans, I interview Jay Baer.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Jay Baer, the author of Youtility, co-host of the Social Pros Podcast and founder of Convince & Convert, an agency and blog focused on digital marketing. His newest book is Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers.

Jay will explore how to convert social media haters into raving fans.

You'll discover why it's important to hug your haters.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Dealing With Unhappy Customers
The backstory of Hug Your Haters

The idea of customer service and customer experience has been at the front of Jay's mind for a long time, he explains. His company Convince & Convert helps major brands with their social media and content marketing, and they increasingly get involved in issues with customers.

It's not just about being proactive and doing marketing, Jay says. You have to be just as good, if not better, at reactive customer service. Jay found even organizations with a lot of resources were befuddled by everything related to digital customer service and experience in the modern world.

Jay shares how conducting a tremendous amount of research with Tom Webster from Edison Research changed the focus of his book.

Last year at Social Media Marketing World, Jay did his "Hug Your Haters" presentation for the first time. Although he has taken the Youtility concept all over the world, Jay says the Hug Your Haters book is the best thing he's ever done and the speech is the best speech he has ever given.

Listen to the show to learn what Tom Webster said he liked about Hug Your Haters in the forward to the book.

What are haters and why do people hate

Jay refers to anybody who complains about a business either off stage or on stage as a hater. An off-stage hater is somebody who complains in private: on telephone and email. An on-stage hater is somebody who complains in public: social media, review sites, discussion boards and forums.

He shares that historically and even currently, the majority of people complain off stage but that the pendulum is swinging the other way because it's much easier to reach out to a brand on Facebook, Twitter or beyond than it is to send an email or wait on hold.

When people complain off stage, they almost always want an answer. They have a problem they want to be fixed, and 90% of the time they expect companies to respond. When people complain on stage, they don't necessarily want an answer; they want an audience. They want people to empathize and engage with them around their experience. If they actually hear back from the company, it's a bonus.

Even though only 47% of the people who complain in public actually expect companies to get back to them, Jay says their research proved that if you actually answer the person who had a bad experience and left a review online, it has a meaningful and significant impact on your customer advocacy.

Listen to the show to discover how content shock also applies to disgruntled customers.

Why engage haters

Jay says haters are not the problem, ignoring them is. He believes there are multiple benefits to answering every complaint in every channel every time, instead of what most businesses do today, which is answer some people some of the time in the channels they prefer.

First, if you answer somebody, you at least have a chance to turn them around.