Description:
What can you do for customers whose experience with your business was so-so? We have the plan to make the best of good reviews and how to handle negative reviews. But what if we put as much effort into customers who fall in the middle?
Transcript:
00:00: Hey, how are you? Nick Bonadies here. I personally believe that most companies out there wanna give you a great experience, they wanna go above and beyond for their customers and for their clients. They wanna create raving fans, and they want you to go online and review them and all that good stuff. Unfortunately, I believe that many companies are falling short and I believe that customers are falling in the middle, and here’s what I mean by that. If you have a great experience, you might go online. Say, you go to a restaurant, for example, you’ll go online, you might do a really nice review, you might call the manager over. You might tell the server that you had a great experience, or talk to their cook. Now, Let me swing the pendulum to the other direction in the opposite way from it, if you have a bad experience, you may or may not say anything. You may say something in the moment at the restaurant, let’s say. Or a lot of people, they don’t say anything in the moment, they go online and then they put a bad review. Either way though, if those people voice their opinion in a moment, you have a chance to do something about it. The ones I’m talking about, they were the ones that are in the middle.
00:55: I personally believe that most people don’t like to raise their hand and say that they’re having a bad experience, so you have… Oh, I don’t know, let’s say it’s 5% of people that have a really great experience, beats their expectations. Then you might have 5% of people that’s on the bottom side where they just have a terrible experience, but what about the other 90% that are in the middle, let’s say in a restaurant? Most of those people… Well, I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve gone into a restaurant before, more than once, and had a terrible experience, but I’ve never said anything. Once in a blue moon I’ll say something, but here’s the thing. I have written that restaurant off and I’m basically in my mindset, I’m never coming back here again. Maybe the food took too long, maybe the service was terrible. Whatever it might be. So I believe that most clients and customers can get caught in this middle, and if they don’t voice their opinion and say something, you never know that they’re actually not happy, and then you lose that customer for the future, maybe forever, or at least for a period of time.
01:50: I personally believe that each business can look at their business and say, what can they do to talk to those people that are in the middle. Let’s say that, I don’t know, 40% or whatever that are not having a great experience, but aren’t really having a bad experience, it’s just, “Meh, so-so.” What is it that you can do to reach those people that are in the middle, that gap that we’re talking about, to win them over where you can actually help their experience in the middle of it? I know restaurants send managers over, for example, and they say, “Oh, how is your meal?” And things like that. That’s not doing it, that just doesn’t do it. You gotta do it in a different way. Maybe walk over and ask the consumer, say, “Hey, what could we be doing better? Please help me to understand what we’re doing phenomenal right now, verses what we’re not.” There’s all different ideas and things that you can do, but I guess the kicker or the thing I’m trying to drill down is, talk to those people in the middle, put a plan together and capture those people in the middle and sway them over to have a really, really great experience, ’cause if you don’t, they will either leave a bad review online, they may never visit your establishment again, and so on and so forth.
02:49: So my suggestion is the people that are in the middle, we’re missing a huge opportunity as business owners and as businesses to actually capture that and help those consumers to swing the pendulum over to be raving fans, because I tell you what, we do it in our business, and if we catch those people early enough and we put a plan together, we can swing them over and have raving fans from then on, so I’m gonna challenge you to focus on those people in the middle, put a plan together and figure out what that is.