Tuesday, April 17, 2012
No business wants to receive negative feedback from its customers, and many are particularly dismayed to see bad reviews or comments made on their public social media pages. However, as J-P De Clerck recently pointed out in Business 2 Community, businesses can benefit by viewing negative feedback as an opportunity to win over a lost consumer by demonstrating excellent customer support.
De Clerck cites a recent study by Harris Interactive that found customers who leave negative comments on a social media pages tend to respond favorably when their feedback receives a response. Of the more than 2,500 respondents surveyed, 68 percent of those who posted a negative review following a bad experience with an online retailer received a response from the company in question. Of those, 34 percent deleted their original negative reviews, 33 percent wrote positive reviews and 18 percent bought more merchandise from the retailer.
As De Clerck argues, this data shows how a company can turn a negative review into a satisfied customer by demonstrating concern for the customer experience.
He further argues that even if they do not respond to negative feedback, companies should not hide its existence. According to De Clerck, consumers become suspicious when they see only positive feedback on a company's social media page, which may cause them to distrust genuinely favorable reviews.
