The Dangers of Passive Word of Mouth Marketing

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Word of Mouth marketing is important in almost any business big or small. Every business lives or dies based on their reputation. So why would you risk leaving Word of Mouth to chance?

While positive reports about your service will get out there over time and create new business for you, bad reports travel like a rocket propelled by hard feelings and anger. Most of your clients who have enjoyed your services will mention you to help out friends and colleagues, but they aren’t active unpaid promoters of your business. When, however, you have let someone down, not delivered on your promise, and have not made things right, their only recourse is to damage you as much as they can.

Studies have shown that when you do a great job, people might tell 3 other people. When you don’t, they will tell eleven others that you haven’t, and those eleven will tell three others because people like to spread the bad news as it helps empowers the disempowered and provides a way to strike back at ‘the system’.

What if you let someone down who owns a megaphone? That is what happened to United Airlines when they let down a touring band, Sons of Maxwell, when they damaged a $3500 guitar when it was tossed around by baggage handlers, an act they witnessed while waiting to disembark. United then passed the buck on responsibility, and after wasting many hours chasing their claim, the band gave up on United, but not on getting even.

The wrote a song about their experience and posted it in on YouTube. At the time of posting, this had been viewed over 2 million times!



The claim for repair of the guitar was $1200, but there seems to be a general policy with United, and probably with most airlines, to make it as difficult as possible to claim damages. Consider the damage in reputation that has occurred to United, and the pain is not over yet. The band’s leader, Dave Carroll, has written a second song (currently being videoed) and is writing a third.

Belatedly United are now looking what they can learn from this incident, examining practices that have obviously been entrenched for years. Will anything good come from it? Well this has made the band’s music become far more widely known and has probably been great for business for them. However, for United, my suspicion is that their spokesperson is just in damage control, and as soon as the fuss is over, it will be business as usual. Am I being cynical? Well the comment from United was from a PR flack not the CEO. You be the judge.

The message for business is that when you give poor service, anyone of your customers may own a megaphone. In fact, today everyone has access to this same megaphone, and if the message hits a chord (sorry about the pun), or a stereotype prevalent in your industry, it will spread before you know it and you will be considered guilty until proven innocent while everyone has fun at your expense.

So treat every customer as if they had their own megaphone so that if they decide to use it, they will just be singing your praises.

May Your Business Be - As You Plan It.

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Link Employee Motivation to Success in Customer Service

by Kevin Cahalane

Do you ‘motivate’ your people by delivering platitudes and sermons? Or, do you provide them with a ‘success motive’ by giving them the skills, knowledge and attributes required to excel at the work they do?

Motivation is a natural consequence of being successful, happy and focussed in your work (for most people anyway; you will never achieve 100% in any endeavour involving people and motivation – but you will come close!). Below are some thoughts to provide a motive to your team, and encourage their self motivation:

 Ensure that employees have the resources they need to be successful. Do staff members have the tools they need to succeed? Is company equipment up-to-date? Does it support efficiency and success?

 Provide employees with the necessary training. What skills do employees need, but currently lack? Is there a commitment to ongoing skills development at your company? Are employees encouraged to attend seminars or conferences to stay abreast of industry changes and trends?

 Put everybody on the same page … develop standards for how the work gets accomplished. Do employees know what is expected of them or does the company rely on common sense? Are standards documented, understood and agreed to by both employer and employee?

 Provide an environment that supports success. Is the workplace neat and orderly? Is their a sense of productivity or does chaos prevail? Are people provided the uninterrupted time they need to achieve success or do unnecessary disruptions limit their efficiency…and effectiveness?

 Develop your employees. Ask employees what their career goals are and help them achieve them. Why would someone want to excel at a job that is not rewarding and fulfilling?

 Promote success by providing consistent, open and honest feedback. Never miss an opportunity to acknowledge an employee. Employees need recognition and praise. Give ample feedback and public recognition whenever possible. When employees need to alter habits or change course, communicate with them as soon as possible; don’t wait for annual reviews.

 Be a model of success yourself. People will respond according to the actions – not the words - of their leaders. Effective leadership is difficult if a manager has one set of standard for themselves and another for everybody else

 Innovate! Foster an environment of creativity in the workplace. Elevate the self-esteem of your staff by asking them their opinions and ideas. Solicit, encourage, and implement new ideas and ways of producing results. Employees with high self-esteem tend to experience greater success in their jobs

Kevin Cahalane Sales and Customer Service Training Professional. See what Kevin can do for you at www.sasemo.com

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Customer Management is not Customer Service

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When you have many customers, you need to manage them, certainly, but this is not the same as customer service. Unfortunately, big businesses think this is the same thing. It is easy to recognise them.

When you call them, you end up listening to a recording telling you which button to push, and then in a phone queue listening to annoying ads for their business, interrupted every few minutes by a recording that says “Your call is important to us…” Obviously not so important that they will pay for more staff to answer the phones.

Then when you get to speak to a human being, they want to manage you in a particular way.
A recent experience with a phone company that will remain nameless (but think of a number between 2 and 4), illustrates this point well. I received a bill which said if I wanted to receive paper bills in the future I had to pay a charge. This was to “save the environment” they said, and then they said if I wanted a paper bill, I could print one from their website. Not much carbon saved there.

Well, I need a paper bill for tax purposes and I find it easier to check things on paper than on a screen bill that goes for several pages. Do you think this was about saving the environment or saving them money?

So I called the company, and said they had no right to increase the charge for my invoice. They then quoted a clause in the phone contract which they claimed gave them the right. I pointed out that this was a new contract, and this clause did not exist in my older contract. They did not have a copy of the old contract and tried to bluff me and intimidate me. After a terse exchange of words with the operator and supervisor, who tried to convince me I did not really want a paper bill, they relented and waived the fee. They said they did not have to and it was just a “good will gesture on their part”.

How gracious.

I guess they felt I would create a mass revolt and their cost cutting exercise was to be put in jeopardy if I was successful.

What it demonstrated to me, is they did not care about their customers, they wanted to manage them. They were prepared to be manipulative and deceitful in doing this. They cared more about saving $2 than bad word of mouth affecting their reputation.

(Why did I go through all this for $2? I have a professional interest in seeing how people manage their customers- in this case not very well, and I believe customer feedback on poor service helps a business improve and benefits the business as well as their customers. Whether they accept the feedback, of course, is another matter.)

When your customer service department thinks it is reasonable to argue with your customers and impute their motives, you have lost the plot. How many other similar conversations do you think occur on other matters with this company if this is their attitude?

What could have they done? They could have said, because we are interested in saving the environment, if you request an electronic account, we will donate the money we save on printing to an environmental cause. (There would be other costs beyond the printing which will still save them money). Does that sound more convincing and better marketing?

While it is important to manage the cost of delivering your service, it is also important to consider the cost of bad word-of-mouth. Don’t be petty. If the customer has a point, and particularly if the cost is small, be gracious. Learn from the experience. You might be surprised by the good word-of-mouth you get which is worth many times the alternative.

May Your Business Be – As You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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Customer Service and Having a Nice Day

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When you hear in a shop assistant say to you as you leave: “Have a nice day”, how do you react. Do you think:

“Thank you for your kind words”

or do you just think:

“This just a meaningless marketing gesture”

Well let me tell you a story from the land that created “Have a nice day”.

We lived for a number of years in the USA and our next move was to the UK. It is interesting to compare attitudes. Our relocation was organised by international removalists. The same company packed us up in the US that unpacked us in the UK, using local staff in each case.

After living in the US for 3 years, we had collected a lot of stuff. So much stuff in fact, it took three days to pack up everything, which gave us an opportunity to see how the employees of this company operated.

Each morning, at exactly the anointed time, there was a ring of the doorbell. Out on the doorstep, there was a team of five men, all smartly dressed in their uniforms, with the team leader, greeting us with a cheery good morning.

They explained exactly what the process was going to be, and over the course their time working in our house, they were courteous, acted on our concerns about fragile items, and silly knick-knacks which would look like junk to any normal person, and treating carefully the many, many books we had accumulated- which were real treasures for my wife. They also left the house each day as tidy as you could it expect it to be- with all rubbish removed.

At any time if they had concerns about the best way of managing something, they politely asked us how we would like it handled. During this stressful time for the whole family, these men made the whole process as painless as possible. Would I recommend them? Wholeheartedly, but with one reservation….

In the UK it was another story. Remember, this was the same company, but with UK staff.

Each day, the staff were late. They always had an excuse, it was those incompetents in head office. They were always taking breaks. They would disappear without notice. Half the team would be absent. There would be different people on different days. There was swearing (although not directly at us- but there was mutterings under their breath). There was resentment at the amount of stuff we had. There were breakages- things that crossed thousands of miles intact, were broken by rough treatment during unpacking. There was knocking off early, and leaving the house a mess. There was no communication on what would happen the next day.

The big difference between the two countries was attitude. In one, the staff new that customer service was part of their job. In the other, they were just putting in the hours. So my reservation in using this company, would be to steer clear of its UK branch.

I soon noticed this attitude in other employees I dealt with in other businesses in the UK. It was quite pervasive. I reached a conclusion about the attitude about the two cultures and my reaction as a customer to that attitude:

I preferred to be told: “Have a nice day” by someone that doesn’t mean it, than to be told; “Sod Off!” by someone who does.

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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