A fact of business: things won’t always go the way we planned. Sometimes we’ll make mistakes.  Sometimes forces beyond our control affect our business.  And when these sorts of things happen, we’ll have unhappy customers on our hands.

The problem is that some business owners hope against hope that customers won’t notice …or at the very least they won’t care.  But of course that’s a pipe dream.  Of course customers will notice and they’ll care – and that means they could be on the verge of getting upset.

Instead of waiting for that to happen, your best bet is to be proactive.  Acknowledge the problem, and offer up a solution.  Don’t wait for your customers to complain first.  And don’t believe that they haven’t noticed (because they have).

If you wait, people have time to ratchet up their frustration level.  If your market likes to chat on niche forums or they have blogs, waiting means you give them time to grow upset and start talking about it on those popular forums and markets.

Have you ever seen someone complain about something on a forum?  At first it’s just one complaint. Then another customer jumps in …and another.  Next thing you know, you have an “angry mob” …and sometimes they’re out for blood.  If they get themselves worked up enough, whatever you do won’t be enough to pacify them.

Think of a herd of cattle.  When one gets spooked and starts running, they all start running.  And once you have a spooked herd stampeding, it’s awfully hard to stop them.  No amount of coaxing and soothing will slow the stampeding herd. 

The only way to deal with a herd like this is to make sure they don’t stampede in the first place.

And so it is with your customers.  If you want to prevent a public lashing that could very well get out of control, be proactive with solutions immediately after you’ve discovered a problem.  When you step forward first with solutions, the “herd” can’t stampede.

Tags: Business, Customer Service

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 09:30 and is filed under Customer Service, Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.