One of the blogs I regularly follow is Seth Godin. Why Seth? He has a very no-nonsense way of putting things in plain english for all of us to understand about marketing, customers and a host of other interesting topics. I was thinking the other day about a particular topic to talk about – how to handle a crisis with a customer to actually build MORE LOYALTY. And wouldn’t you know it, Seth happens to write an interesting blog entry on just that topic.
Rather than repeat what Seth said in “Winning on the Uphills” post, I just wanted to share this with you and add my 2 cents. The key in this to me is hat we all have the “moments of truth” many call them where things are in a shambles and look like there is no light at the end of the tunnel (except the oncoming train) and we don’t know what to do. The key here is to “rally the resources” and demonstrate what you are really made of – delivering a great customer experience.
It reminds me of my days back at IBM when something would go wrong with a system or an installation (I was in sales and sold their big iron to big companies). They didn’t sit around and blame or point fingers or try to convince the customer it was their problem, NO, they put “people in planes” and flew them in to solve the problem. The customers LOVED it and we earned more LOYALTY that day than all the other days where we just kept them happy.
Morale of the story – use the worst of times and the crisis to demonstrate what it is your customer wants – focus on their issue and resolving it in the heat of battle. And you don’t have to do this very many times – only once in a while and you earn a lot of Loyalty Points in their eyes. So “man up” and show them what you’ve got…
