It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. When you turn on a news broadcast or open up a newspaper each day, you are guaranteed to see bad news. Perhaps, they should be called bad news broadcasts and bad newspapers. Sadly, people seem to be most intrigued by mishaps, tragedies, accidents and misfortunes.
Well, the same can be said about your business. Sorry, but this too is true. People are lot more likely to have discussions about a bad experience they had with your company than the good ones they had. The fact is that customers expect good customer service all the time. So when they receive it, there’s really nothing to report about it.
But when it’s bad…watch out! The news is bound to spread like wild fire. A friend of MeloTel’s recently informed us of a horrible experience she encountered with a car rental company. It turns out they charged her for three days when she only had the car for two. Even worse was the fact that they claimed that she returned the car late.
“I returned it promptly by 4 p.m.,” she recalls, “I was told I had until five to bring it back. It took forever to get someone on the phone to complain about it. And when the person picked up, he informed me that I went over my two day period and that’s why I was charged for an extra day. He couldn’t have been more wrong, I was livid!”
To resolve the problem, our friend made phone calls and wrote letters to both the car rental company and her credit card company. She felt that she was not only being over charged but that she was given false information by the car rental representative and was being forced to literally pay for it.
To make her frustrations known, she also went to Facebook and Twitter to expose the company for the bad experience she went through. This is a normal practice by today’s standards. It’s widely known that social media profiles are rampant with complaints and rants about things that people simply despise.
And why wouldn’t they be? News broadcasts deliver bad news all of the time. So why wouldn’t your average every day person be quick to do the same? The lesson to be learned in all of this, of course, is to always give your customers news worthy experiences…of the good, not bad variety.
More than just good, your customer service needs to be exceptional. Literally. It needs to be the exception to the rule that only bad news spreads. When you go over and above the call of duty to “wow” your customers, the good news about your business is a lot more likely to spread. This is the best way to get new customers – word-of-mouth can do wonders!