Marketing is Customer Service

Most Thursdays, I get the opportunity to moderate the MarketingProfs PRO seminars. These are marketing talks with 100+ audience members who have paid to tune in live to hear a featured guest speak on a marketing topic for about 45-60 mins.

We follow with a live Q&A session thanks to the comments and questions from the audience. These sessions are recorded. The audience members and anyone with a PRO membership who couldn’t catch the show live, can listen on demand at any time.

Bad Online Review? Jay says “Hug Your Haters”

Jay Baer, president of Convince and Convert and author of Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers was our speaker.

Jay addressed the first problem with complaints – they are often due to the gap between what our customers expect of us and what is delivered. And the deadly – what if no one is complaining?

If no one is complaining to you about your business, you have a larger problem than you think. Jay says that it is not the complaints that kill a business, it is that “silent” majority who you never hear from, yet are not happy with your company.

The cure? Make it easier for your customers to complain to you. Don’t like the word complain? Call it feed back, express an opinion, your two cents.

It is only when you know what is wrong, that you can fix it.

The live audience posed questions for Jay ranging from customer service reps getting abusive treatment from upset customers (Jay’s research on what this happens and what to do about it was eye-opening), negative online reviews from people who didn’t like a price quote and did not become a customer, to how to embed this kind of thinking in a company – would it be from the top down, or grassroots bottom up?

Jay had helpful and practical recommendations to solve each problem covering small business, b2b, b2c and healthcare. Marketing is customer service.

Give this one a watch.

Click through to catch  Jay Baer’s MarketingProfs PRO Seminar – Hug Your Haters.