Person A is a whiner. He buys your product and is unhappy with something. He called your customer service and was given the standard “that’s our policy” speech which didn’t help that much. He was upset, and he just happens to write a pretty popular blog. So he wrote about his experience. The article was titled “brand B sucks”. Some of his readers read it, and responded and the article spread a little bit. So now every time someone Google the phrase, “Brand B sucks”, Person A’s article would appear on the first page.
What do you do?
First off, the more obvious questions are:
- Do you or anyone in your company even know the existence of the “brand B sucks” article?
- If you somehow saw the article, called a meeting, and showed it to your PR/marketing team, what would the reaction be?
- What would you do to prevent something like this from happening again?
The easy answers are: no, nothing, and nothing. And that’s not an unusual approach to handle problems like this — it wasn’t a big deal, and won’t effect your brand that much anyway.
But for argument’s sake, let’s assume you decided to do something about it. You sent an email to Person A and found out the reason which he was upset about your product. You offered to help and eventually sent him a brand new product free of charge. He wrote an article and said some nice things. It again was linked a couple times by his readers. Case closed; life goes on.
Whiners are precious in the sense that they care enough to make a complaint about their problems, whatever the motivation may be. The rest of us, usually choose to ignore the problems all together and move on. Here is the thing, I have written many times that “average products created for average people” doesn’t spread online. The theory holds true here also, one average person with one average complaint about a product is NOT going to make a difference. The exception would be if the person or the company or the product was extremely popular or the problem was simply outrageous, but that’s a different story.
But wait, there is more.
A few weeks later, something similar happens. Same product, different person. Only this time, your customer service people remembered what happened with Person A and offered to solve the problem by sending out a brand new product free of charge, just like last time. And the same thing happened again and again for the duration of the product life cycle.
All of sudden, your company still makes the same average product, but little by little, the effort you put into solving problems for the whiners turns into something entirely different. Your brand is now officially transformed. Two years from now, when someone Google the phrase “Brand B Sucks”, not only will she find the original articles with the whiners’ complaints, she would also find dozens of blogs stating that you went out of your way to avoid the “standard” procedures and actually offered a reasonable solution to the problem.
But wait, what about all the extra cost? What if people found out about what you are doing and start to take advantage of your company?
I have two answers for you: a) if your customers keep having the same problems on the same product, it might not be a bad idea to consider changing the product, and b) if you are able to tell the difference between a valid complaint and a shameless attempt of getting something for free, so will most other people.
I think the brands with the most whiners online have the most potential for growth.
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