Hi, this is Your Would-Be Customer.

I heard about you in a blog discussion the other day, so I thought I would go see who you are. So I Googled you, and tried to figure out what the address to your website is. I found it, or so I thought, since your name showed up lots of times in the search results.

I saw a lot of links that seemed to be selling what I was after, with your name on it, so I clicked on several of them. However, these were all websites driving traffic to your competitors. You were actually on the list, but I would never have thought that was you, since the title of that page seemed totally irrelevant to me.

I was about to give up, and only clicked to get to your website after trying most of the others. I had run out of patience, but I finally found your website. So of course I tried searching your website for the product I want, and got 213 results, mostly from the forums. Well, I am a patient Customer, so I dug through all that information, and finally found the product I wanted.

I wasn’t ready to order, but I signed up for e-mail updates on price changes and offers. After researching further, I was ready to buy your product, if the price was right.

So here are 10 things I think about you:

1. Once I started out, my expectations were high, since the positive mention in the blog seemed sincere. It was probably one of your satisfied customers. It didn’t appear to be anyone associated with your company. So, good thing you did something good from someone.
2. When searching on Google for your product, it disappointed me a little bit to find that you don’t rank highest, even for your own product or brand.
3. You describe your web page (with the title and description shown in the search results) with a general term – not specific to the product or brand I was looking for. Could you please tell me – right in the search results – what your page is about?
4. The search results on your website list fragmented sentences that didn’t mean anything to me. I typed your product’s name and model in exactly – I was expecting to get to the product page immediately. Instead, I had to scroll down to find the product page listed (not highest, I might add). I know, I should have jumped ship there and then. But I didn’t.
5. Instead, I signed up for an e-mail subscription with product updates and special offers once I got to the product page. I would have loved to have only signed up for the offers, since I was just about ready to buy, and didn’t need to get informed every week about updates to your product that I hadn’t bought yet.
6. So I got the e-mails in the subscription. However, it took me a while that the e-mails were from you, since you used a very generic subject, saying “Information” in the e-mail, and the From-address wasn’t from your domain.
7. After a month, I had received 7 irrelevant e-mails (missing the offers I was looking for). I was tired of your spamming, and wanted to unsubscribe. Your e-mails contained instructions – but they said to reply from the same address I had subscribed from. Personally, I use forwarding addresses for subscriptions, to be able to drop any that receive too much spam. The problem is, that replying to the e-mail would be from my main e-mail address, so it wouldn’t get unsubscribed. Why would you not just let me click a link??
8. Finally, I decided to e-mail your customer support. Your website has a contact form, which is easy to find, I’m glad to say. So I filled it out and sent it to you. …and received no reply.
9. Well, actually I did receive one, 10 days later with a standard blurb that was useless to me. I never got in contact with a person on the other end. What kind of customer service standard is that?
10. So I’ll go back to that blog, and post a negative comment about you. And I’ll write about you on my own blog – I have about 1000 subscribers on that one. About 1% of those post related posts in their blogs as well. In other words, by being ignorant in your communication – not even by directly mistreating your customer, but by just not paying enough attention – you have earned a bad reputation among anyone I can influence.

And by the way, I think it was probably you yourself who posted that first blog comment, after all.

Filed under: Social Media Marketing
Tags:Reputation Management, Your Customer