Wounds

Skinned knees heal.  Broken arms mend.  Wounded feelings and damaged trust don't often repair themselves as easily or reliably.

In business, as in  relationships, you cannot count on nature or time to heal wounds.  Despite the saying that time heals all wounds, smart  businesses seek out customers (or former customers) who are feeling wounded.  They seek them out and talk to them.

Talking to disappointed customers has many benefits:

• You have an opportunity to right the wrong.  This can often turn a bad experience into a good one for the customer.
• You learn quickly what isn't going right so you can address the problem before it disappoints more customers.
•  By reaching out to customers, and making this a routine practice, you help to evolve your culture into one that is more caring and customer-focused.
• After you have shown a customer that you care enough to learn about their problems and concerns and take steps to address them, you are likely to increase the loyalty of that customer.
• You are also likely to turn negative word-of-mouth into positive testimonial.  This is powerful in two ways.  First you get someone talking positively about you and your brand.  Second, because negative word-of-mouth spreads many times faster than positive word-of-mouth, you stem a tide of mind-changing bad publicity.

Often times, when you take time to listen to customers' concerns, you will find that the problems are not ones that you were aware of before you listened.  And sometimes they aren't hard to fix.  Furthermore, you will find that most customers understand that you cannot change everything.  They will understand that even when you can change something, you might not be able to make the change in time to impact their personal experience.  They also understand that because you took the time to listen to them, that they are important to you.

I had a boss and mentor once who said that the customers who complained were our greatest friends.  "They are taking their time to tell us where we made a mistake and how we can get better.  We pay consultants lots of money for the same advice!"

Related articles

• 10 Ways to Make Customers Fall in Love with Your Business
• "Please complain"

Key Communicators are...Key

People talk to people...and those people talk to other people...who talk to others...and so on and so on and so on.

The holy grail of any professional communicator is generating positive word of mouth communications.  We all know that people find messages from their friends and neighbors to be more trustworthy and worthy of consideration than messages from ads or other "professional" communications sources.  Word of mouth messages are seen as trustworthy because they are filtered through the opinion of a disinterested third party.  The thinking is "I trust Becky and if Becky is giving me a message, that message must be trustworthy!"

The challenge, from a professional communicator's point of view, is that the very factor that makes word of mouth so desirable makes it very hard to manage!  To someone who is used to developing style books,  overseeing every comma and semicolon of an organization's communications, and who's mantra is "stay on message," this is difficult to accept.

You may not be able to control the message when it comes to word of mouth communications...but you can influence it!

Developing a key communicator network of key opinion leaders in your community or industry is one way to let the grapevine work for you.  The concept is simple.  You identify those individuals who are opinions leaders within your target audience.  These are the people that other people listen to and believe.  These are not always just the community or industry leaders.  They might be the hairdresser or PTA Mom or the blogger whom everyone listens to in order to find out what's what.

Once you identify who you want to be in your group, you invite them to join.  You tell them that as they are the opinion leaders of the industry or community, your organization will be providing them with extra information on your organization.  The only thing you ask in return is that they participate in some future survey or focus group once or twice a year that allows you to collect THEIR opinions on what people are thinking about regarding issues important to you.

You supply your key communicators with additional information about your company, your issues and/or your industry.  It is important that you provide your key communicators with accurate, realistic data.  Don't try to "spin" your key communicators or you will lose them.  However, if you provide them with real, trustworthy information, on a reliable basis, amazing things can happen.

This works for a few reasons.  First, being recognized as a Key Communicator is an honor to most people.  Better yet it is an honor that comes with few obligations!  Second, you are giving your Key Communicators something that they truly value, access to unique information.  Since they are communicators, they should value being able to share information with their various contacts.  Access to the information you are providing them increases their stature as a communicator.  Third, if you are doing this well, this works because you are not putting any caveats on their access to the information.  You are not even suggesting that they go out and share the information.  You are sharing it with them because you feel that they would find it interesting.

Once again, the frustrating part of this is that you, as a professional communicator, cannot control the message or the flow of information.  You have to just put it out their on faith that it will do your organization good.  And you may never know what good it does, but every once in a while you get confirmation that the process makes sense.

A week or so after my school district celebrated a rare referendum victory, I was talking to a community member who was in my Key Communicator group.  She was congratulating me on the referendum and started talking about how some people in the community had had misunderstandings about the referendum.  She proceeded to tell me about a couple of neighbors who told her why they planned to vote against the school district and then shared the arguments she told them in favor of the school district.  Her arguments, coincidentally were taken almost directly from a referendum fact sheet I had sent our Key Communicators.  This Key Communicator, without even realizing it, had helped promote the district's point of  view.  I became a committed believer in the power of Key Communicators at that moment.