Walking the Walk

It’s plain and simple – if you promise something you can’t deliver, you lose customers. Not just current customers, but future customers, the ones that talk to the disappointed people that you have let down and the ones who read your angry blog!

We mentioned yesterday that one of the worst things that can happen to a company is for a bunch of ‘(your company) sucks’ and ‘I hate (your company) sites to spring up. Anyone with a beef against anything is now apt to go online and gripe about it, so customer satisfaction is more important than ever!

Don’t hesitate to monitor blogs in your industry, to keep a watch on what links to you, and to surf the social networks to be sure you don’t get any bad publicity. If you can head off an inadvertent mistake from becoming a major conflagration online, you can save yourself a lot of trouble!

This means making sure you never promise more than you can deliver, that you follow through on promises, that you offer excellent presale and post sale support, and that you deal with any disgruntled customers quickly and carefully

Sometimes this may mean bending over backward to make them happy, even if you aren’t in the wrong. This is especially important if you have been ambiguous in any way. If you are on some sort of business where yards of legal verbiage and fine print make up your agreements, perhaps you are too close to the shady side of the line.

If you can’t spell out in big print what your obligations are and what is the onus of the customer, you better expect trouble. You get the legal high ground if you can point to part six subsection B paragraph 4:10, but you lose a lot of credibility and the customer may often feel that they have the moral high ground.

This can quickly spread to others on the web, so try to make sure your customer acknowledges their rights and yours before misunderstandings happen (and not just by clicking “I agree” on a teensy little scroll down box that in actuality holds 19 pages of rules and exceptions to those rules.

If you make a verbal agreement, stick to it. Sure, it might not be binding in court, but many people still believe in a virtual form of a handshake, so you might find that it behooves you to be a little more agreeable than the law insists that you be.

One more note- when it comes to the safety of your customers data, you MUST come through. Nothing can kill a website quicker than bad publicity, except bad publicity about how hackers stole customers’ info from you. Watch your step, talk the talk and above all walk the walk – a company that doesn’t keep its promises isn’t worth the bandwidth it occupies!!