How Organizations can handle their Detractors in 2020

I recently had a bad delivery experience with a food aggregator and like any irate customer, I let the live agent know about the same.

They ensured to give me a call within 3 min of receiving my unpleasant message, initiated a refund and also offered an additional 20% discount for my next order.

Now, will this bad experience deter me from ordering again on this platform?

Well, obviously No, not just because they gave me that 20% discount coupon but because they were human enough to admit their mistake and ensured to tackle my unpleasant experience immediately without I have to send multiple follow up messages.

As a marketing technologist, I often wonder how many companies have formalized such a process of handling an unhappy customer.

Firstly, are businesses capturing customer feedback? Secondly, if the company is aware of such unhappy customers, are they reaching out quickly to such customers before the customer decides to wash the dirty linen in public?

An NPS software can prove to be useful in this case. It can help businesses capture customer feedback and categorize them into three basic categories.

• what is a Promoter: If a customer gave a score of 9 or 10 then the customer is clearly a promoter of the brand.
• Detractor: If a customer gave a score of 6 or below, then the customer is a detractor.
• what is a Passive: If a customer gave a score of 7 or 8 then the customer is passive

The ratio of promoters to detractors is a critical metric to understand the overall sentiment.

 

So, what are a few critical measures to handle detractors and convert them to promoters?

As mentioned above, the first step towards identifying your detractors would be to record customer feedback across multiple channels(email, social media, SMS, calls, etc) and deploy an NPS tool to assess your customer split between promoters, detractors, and passives.

Post that, start by assessing a customer’s journey and map it to the relevant internal operations necessary. This is one of the core steps in setting up what I have termed as a detractor handling process.

Setting up a detractor defense process can become an important differentiator – an opportunity where your business practices can be remembered for good.

So, how can your organization set up a detractor handling process that can be institutionalized for years to come? It’s not just about introducing tools and measuring metrics; the process should consider holistically about

1. Setting up or updating the internal processes as per the various customer journeys
2. Setting up or updating a comprehensive feedback ecosystem that measures critical customer sentiments
3. Humanizing detractor interactions

Let’s start with setting up or updating the internal processes as per the customer(rather detractor) journeys :

Most businesses deal with detractors in a very reactionary manner and make decisions on a case-to-case basis rather than setting a process around it. Let’s take the same example of a food aggregator business dealing with a detractor.

In a traditional setting, most businesses would expect their call center team to deal with irate customers, handle their complaints and document them for future training purposes. But the resolution may not end there.

What if the irate customer spreads negative news about the brand on social media, leaving reviews across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and may further negatively influence his/her network against your brand.

If a business keeps taking reactionary measures, they may not have enough time to make relevant changes in the complaint handling process.

Instead, with a small assessment of its customer journey, an organization can identify the likelihood of

• receiving complaints across multiple channels,
• provide sufficient self-service resolution options,
• set up an instant reward incentive to avoid churn,
• arrange a follow-up call to understand the concern or
• automate a comprehensive email journey to keep the unhappy customer posted about their issue resolution.

Assess your customer journey, plan the requisite follow-up process and measure the relevant metrics:

The next measure would be to set up an ecosystem of tools that measures the metrics and the impact of your initiatives to handle different types of complaints and feedback from your detractors. In simple words,

Set up an omnichannel feedback collection and complaint handling ecosystem

Certain NPS software also helps businesses recognize detractors before they can raise a complaint. With the aid of such software, organizations can easily identify their dissatisfied and at-risk customers through certain real-time detractor alerts that can aid in setting up an instant feedback loop to reach out to your detractors in a timely manner.

Coming to the most important measure of all: Humanize your interactions

Once organizations have set up the processes and systems in place, they should come to grip by humanizing the detractor interactions to neutralize their negative sentiment.

• Firstly, if you have not reached out to the detractors via a phone call, it is highly suggested that companies set up a process to call and initiate an honest and apologetic conversation with their detractors. Few thumb rules for humanizing your detractor calls include: Apologize and acknowledge the problem. Listen patiently to the detractor’s feedback and be proactive to own up the mistakes however small or minute they may be
• Be transparent about situation, explain what went wrong and assure to avoid future occurrences of such issues
• Extend and facilitate a simple follow-up mechanism: Notify them about the issue resolution progress via emails and calls based on a prioritization matrix based on the complexity of the issue and the sentiment of the detractor

Few steps in humanizing the interactions can go a long way in transforming detractors to promoters.

Again, changing a detractor into a promoter takes more than one phone call and requires a journey of interactions that builds up trust and confidence in their minds.

However, implementing some of the above-mentioned measures can go a long way in transforming a detractor’s attitude towards your business.

After all, every detractor too is a human and understands that it’s only human to err.