Be careful with the social networks

We all know how important it is to take our customers’ complaints seriously. While it can be easy to stop worrying once we’ve made the sale and collected the money, it’s just not good for business in the long run. Also, you have to remember that word of mouth has always spread rapidly; if one person is very dissatisfied, many people will know it at the end of the day. That was true back in the days when there were only phones and snail mail, and it’s especially true in today’s world, where emails, forums, online message boards, and worst of all, social media are rampant. . If you piss off a customer, it only takes two seconds for you to post a cruel video on YouTube for the world to see, “tweet” an angry message via Twitter to all your followers, or create a rude status update on your own. Facebook or Myspace pages or even on your company page!

As such, you really need to start thinking more seriously about how you treat your customers, especially when they have a complaint, question, or some other issue after the purchase. If you don’t deal directly with such customers, then you’ll want to make sure your customer support representatives are properly trained in customer etiquette and are doing their jobs right. All it takes is one very rude customer representative to blow away your company’s entire reputation! Of course, we know you can’t keep an eye on all of your customer service reps all the time, especially if you’re a large company, but you can randomly monitor them by recording calls to check “quality of service.” You need to let both your workers and callers know that you’ll be recording, but people rarely seem to care about this.

Of course, the best way to avoid having to worry about your customer service representatives is to create quality products that you don’t get a lot of complaints about. Please spend enough time to make sure your products are well made and test them yourself after production. If you can already tell that a product is cheap or if you see with your own eyes that it breaks after just a few uses, then, quite simply, don’t sell it! While it may be tempting to earn that extra buck, it’s not worth the barrage of complaints and potential damage to your company’s reputation.

Quality starts with you, the business owner, and continues with all of your employees who deal with your customers. You need to make sure everyone is doing their job and treating their customers with the respect they deserve. After all, while their complaints and/or questions can be annoying, you wouldn’t be in business without them. A customer trusts you when they buy your products, so go the extra mile not to let them down! Doing so may cause you to appear unfavorably on social networking sites.