Negative feedback can be hard to take when you care about your brand and believe in your product or service. Hearing from disgruntled clients and customers can take the wind out of your sails and force you to rethink how you approach the market.
However, seen in the right light, negative reviews aren’t always a bad thing. They give you a chance to address pain points in public and may help you refine the way you go about business.
Seeing stormy seas as an opportunity can help you calm angry clients and put forward a more professional appearance. This is crucial as if you want to retain customers, you’ll need to show that you are receptive to feedback and authentically care about their experience.
Active Listening
In today’s data-driven marketing world, it’s easy to overlook the sincere feedback of a single customer. However, if you want to make the most of your customer communication channels, you’ll need to ensure that every client feels appreciated, valued, and heard. A strong customer communication channel comes with some serious benefits, including:
- Brand Loyalty: When folks know you care about them, they’re more likely to think highly of your brand. This means every interaction you have is an opportunity to build your brand to secure higher loyalty.
- Customer Retention: Most businesses rely on repeat purchases to secure profitability and growth. A great marketing response plays a crucial role in securing retention amongst both happy and unhappy customers.
- Sales: A strong customer communication channel shows prospective clients that you run a legitimate, customer-centric firm. This will drive sales and convince folks to side with you over the competition.
Actively listening to negative reviews can help you understand your clients on a deeper level, too. Sometimes qualitative feedback helps you pivot towards new marketing methods and improve the relevancy of the content you produce. Active listening can help your marketing team embrace the customer experience and benefit from:
- Competitive Differentiation: Active listening helps you nail the customer experience and gives you a real competitive advantage over businesses that don’t listen to their clients.
- Positive Re-Reviews: Folks who re-review your product or service are like gold dust. It shows the world that you have addressed the issues and improved your business based on the feedback you received.
- Reduced CAC: Minimizing your customer acquisition costs (CAC) is easy when you are benefiting from word-of-mouth advertising and repeat purchases. Active listening can turn angry clients into understanding, respectful ones who significantly boost the profitability of your marketing efforts.
- Enhanced CLV: Boosting customer lifetime value (CLV) is a priority for all marketing teams. Put simply, using active listening to re-engage folks who leave a negative review can make a huge difference to your CLV and maximize your revenue potential per customer.
Clearly, you can’t afford to overlook the benefits of active listening when working with angry clients. Clients who feel heard can be re-engaged and your relationship can be repaired if you embrace the customer experience and compose professional responses to disgruntled consumers.
Composing A Professional Response
It’s normal to feel frustrated when an angry email lands in your inbox or a negative review gets published on your site. However, if you want to retain your clients and prove that you value the customer experience, you’ll need to compose professional, understanding responses.
First, assess the pain points your customer highlights and try to understand what went wrong. This will help you put forward an informed, empathetic persona when you start to type up your response.
Once you’ve identified the issue, draft a response that works through the following steps:
- Acknowledge the review and thank the client for their message,
- Apologize for your shortcomings and the potential impact it may have had on the client,
- Transition towards solutions to the problem and provide the client with an email address or a private DM request so they can get in touch with your customer support team,
- Attempt to re-engage the customer by offering freebies and refunds.
Transitioning through these stages will show that you are accountable and want to improve your reputation. This is crucial, as most clients want to work with brands that are receptive to feedback and will make changes based on their insights.
Here’s an example of a heartfelt response:
Composing professional responses can be tricky. This is why you should invest in continued learning and training at your place of work. Continued learning empowers the employees who deal most with angry clients and gives them tools to build more productive relationships with angry clients. This will improve employee retention and reduce your business turnover costs. Employees who are well-trained with fundamental feedback responses are more likely to think innovatively and approach angry clients from a position of curiosity and creativity.
It is, however, important to recognize that some reviews are genuinely unjust. Sometimes, folks will leave scam-like negative reviews on your site in an attempt to gain an unwarranted refund or tarnish your brand reputation. In these cases, it’s important to put forward a respectful, professional response while asserting why the feedback is unwarranted. Just be aware that this means you are probably “firing” a client due to their negative, unwarranted review.
Foregrounding Your Improvements
Once you’ve calmed angry clients, consider re-engaging them at a later date to show how their feedback improved your operations. This empowers clients and helps them feel like your relationship is reciprocal. This is important, as it will boost your CLV and is an easy way to reduce your CAC.
If you do decide to get in touch with previously disgruntled clients, consider offering the improved product or service as a freebie. This gesture of goodwill is far more likely to result in re-engagement, as clients are unlikely to pay for something that they effectively suggested.
Remember to foreground your improvements in public spaces, too. Folks love to hear messages that begin with “We heard you and made change X,” as it shows that you have invested time and effort into improving your operations and are committed to the customer journey. This is particularly important if you have a strong social presence and need to get ahead of bad press online.
Reviews of Social Media
Social media can be a challenging platform if you’re going through a rocky period. Folks will flock to your Instagram page or Facebook groups if you’ve recently underdelivered on promises or have made a PR faux pas. Failing to address these angry clients is a major misstep, as your socials will quickly be overrun with bad press unless you commit to combatting negative social media press by:
- Respond Quickly: Getting your message out before bad PR can spread is key. This will help alleviate your client’s anger and show that you’re aware of developing issues.
- Go Private: Don’t get stuck in the comment section. Instead, take the conversation somewhere private by providing an email address or working with clients via DMs.
- Be Understanding: Showing that you understand clients’ concerns on social media can improve relations and alleviate tension. Show that you understand and try to validate folks who have legitimate pain points.
- Offer Solutions: Following up with angry clients on sites like X can be a boon for your brand presence. Use the negative feedback as an opportunity to step in with a solution that saves the client money, addresses their issue, and effectively reengages them. Here’s an example:
When working on social media, it’s important that you recognize when not to engage. Social sites like X and Facebook are filled with trolls who do not authentically represent your client’s needs. Immediately remove any discriminatory remarks and “fire” any clients who post any kind of hate speech. This is key, as you need to act as a strong moderator in your comments and replies section if you want to keep your social pages inclusive and community-focused.
You can also use your social pages to calm angry clients by posting preventive content. For example, if you run a car rental service and have been affected by a system outage, use your social page to make clients aware of the issue. Foreground the steps you are taking to fix the problem and try to give a timeline as soon as possible. This will help folks empathize with the challenges you face and may help you get in contact with angry clients who are considering leaving your business.
If you want to engage clients in a private forum, consider starting a private Facebook group. Private Facebook groups are easier to moderate and will innately improve your ability to connect with clients. It will personalize your brand and give clients an inside look at the way you address potential issues. This community-driven approach can calm hot-headed clients and minimize the risk of bad PR leaking onto public-facing channels.
Conclusion
Navigating stormy seas can be tricky when you’re worried about negative client feedback. However, in reality, negative feedback is an opportunity to improve your marketing strategy and streamline your operations.
Effectively calming angry clients is a great way to reduce CAC and improve your CLV, too, as folks who see improvements are far more likely to stick by your business. Just be sure to always put forward a professional, respectful tone when working with angry clients, as this can reduce the risk of further damage to your brand reputation.
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