Hug Your Haters

Hug Your Haters talks about the importance of acknowledging your haters or dissatisfied customers and valuing their opinion in the process of building better products, improving the existing offerings, and growing your strategies overall.

Attracting new customers is a difficult road to take, but there are better options out there once you have a stable customer base: retaining them. The book suggests that by keeping even a small percentage of your customers loyal to you, profits can grow as much as 85% – now that’s a great business strategy!

Retaining loyal audiences is also much easier than acquiring new prospects, but it all comes with a catch – stellar customer service. When you offer better options, support, and products than your competition, chances are that the market will notice that and stick with you.

To become the go-to choice for people, you’ll have to continuously improve and work on the negative feedback. Receiving criticism can be tough, but if you acknowledge it, let your customers know that you’re actively working towards remediating it, and offer them support or even benefits like discounts or free-of-charge products, you’ll surely get through any situation successfully.

What’s also particularly important is to embrace negative feedback, instead of hiding it. Publicly remediation situations can grow your reliability and foster a good reputation. Then, chances are your customers will stay loyal to your brand and not migrate to other options that put more care and thought into their customers.

Now that we’ve understood the importance of accepting negative feedback and treating it as valuable input for your company, let’s go through some of the ways you can use it to address these complaints and concerns. The author calls for the HOURS method, which stands for: (Be) Human – get personal with your dissatisfied customers and tailor your response to their concerns. Treat them as human beings with distinctive personality traits, not just data sources. (Use) One channel – don’t forward their complaints and pass them around. Don’t refer them to someone else, a FAQ channel, or anything at all. Simply fix their issue. Unify data – get all the information you need to act upon their request and resolve it immediately. Resolve – act quickly and fix the negative occurrence properly, not just to get it off of your chest, but to make it better for the customer. Speed – treat problems with a sense of urgency and fix them quickly. Compile these solutions into a fully integrated method by discussing with your team and finding a procedure that you can implement together. Make sure each member receives training so that you’re all on the same page and that you set up a written procedure in…