Blog posts in Customer care

The blog is mightier than the sword

In the old days a quibble over a product or service not being up to scratch would be resolved through an exchange of letters with a customer service department. A swift resolution ensuing, the customer would be happy and the business might have gone beyond just saving face and reinforced its brand values, too. Today, this model is not quite so strong.

According to Webuser.co.uk, a holidaymaker has secured £600 in compensation for a disastrous holiday as a result of the prominent Google search ranking he achieved for the angry blog he fired off when a complaint letter to the holiday firm yielded no result.

The holidaymaker had originally penned a letter of complaint (ten pages of letter, in fact) detailing a depressing series of problems he encountered during a less than satisfactory Tunisian holiday. After six weeks, having only received an acknowledgment for his rant, the increasingly angry traveller went public and recorded his troubles on his personal blog.

In no time, he was getting lots of traffic – much of it from people who had simply typed search terms relating to holidays in Tunisia. In fact, the critical blog entry’s Google ranking was creeping ever closer to the summit on all the key search terms the travel company would rather see taking you to the holiday package they were trying to flog.

Once the holiday company became aware of the growing popularity of the blog post, blogs about the blog post and probably even blogs blogging about the impact of blog posts about the original blog post - such is the way the Internet feeds off itself - it became apparent that an “elevated” level of response was required. Compensation was paid to the blogger and an apology posted on his blog, to boot.

However, it may be too late for damage limitation – the rant, of course, has been widely seen and still exists in the public domain. The digital footprint of a blog post that would never have seen the light of day had the travel company responded sooner is now leaving the most indelible – and embarrassing – of stains on its reputation.

At the Risk of Sounding Cheesy... Please Smile

Is this a blog from a professional marketer, or a thinly disguised rant from a miffed customer? I don't know, but after a visit to my local coffee shop this morning, I felt compelled to share a few thoughts on the subject of... smiling.

I've read no end of marketing books over the years and always taken some great advice from each one, in addition to some cracking statements that I use when training small businesses in the art of marketing on a shoestring.  Most recently, the line:  "the process is as important as the outcome" about the delivery of a product or service, really stuck out. And this morning, it was in at the front of my mind when being served by the owner of the coffee shop. She did the right things, albeit in an efficient manner that was bordering on brusque. However, she didn't make eye contact with me and she failed to smile even though I gave her a big beam. What made it worse was that she became animated and smiling when talking to her colleague.

It got me thinking that in our zeal to find the big marketing miracle at the end of the rainbow, we can often overlook the fact that the smallest things make the biggest difference. It's not simply what we actually deliver - whether we sell cakes and coffee or build websites, it is how we actually deliver and whether we make our customers feel fabulous. In my experience, many small businesses can get caught up in searching high and low for their unique selling point when in fact what makes them unique in a sea of "me too" products and services is how they interact with their customers.

So, a warm and genuine smile can go a long way, especially if we deliver products and services face to face. But, if we are not within an arm's-length of our customers, the words we use to describe what we deliver should communicate passion, warmth and enthusiasm. I believe that relevance, simplicity and humanity will define the successful brands of the future and not just the clever use of technology. Now will someone put the kettle on!