Instead of approaching the typical customer complaint with anxiety and trepidation, why not try winning them over? Your return on investment just might convince you it’s worth your time.

We all know that bad news travels faster than good news, so how do we stop the negative feedback from reaching prospective clients and better yet, is it possible to resolve the original complaint fast enough to turn the complaint completely around?

TARP Worldwide is recognized as the world’s premier customer experience agency. John Goodmam cofounded TARP in 1971 and is still helping companies quantify and manage the customer experience in order to apply that knowledge to help clients realize bottom-line results.

So what happens when that knowledge identifies negative experiences? Let’s say one disappointed customer decides it won’t do any good to report the negative experience to the company, assuming it won’t do any good, so that person tells, on average, 6 others. Those other 6 become dissatisfied with you, without even giving you a single opportunity to prove otherwise and tell 9 others. We now have a probable 63 negative customer experiences.

According to TARP, there is an assumed level of influence of 25%. Only one quarter of those 64 (rounding up from 63 for cleaner number crunching) will act on what they hear. This means 16 people are likely to remember the poor customer service remarks and, voila~ Pandora’s box is wide open.

At this point, mouth wide open, we realize that saving one customer is more like saving 16! So let’s talk how to consistently handle negative customer experiences:

1. Identify issue at the EXACT point of negative experience
2. Encourage company contact to show true empathy
3. Empower company contact to DEFUSE the situation by openly discussing viable solutions
4. End with a thanking customer and passing along the experience/outcome/solution internally for analysis and permanent solution

Learning from past case studies can help companies avoid similar pitfalls and also provides excellent fodder for turning bad situations into good experiences. Take for instance Toyota and it’s recent massive recall issue.

Take a look at the following clips :

Toyota speaks directly to owners through an ad campaign that tells its audience that they haven’t been living up to their standards and in order to restore faith in their current and potential customers, they stopped production and dedicated more than 170,000 employees to working around the clock to fixing repairs .

Jim Lentz , President and COO of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. released a two-minute and 15 second clip on YouTube to officially apologize to those inconvenienced by Toyota’s recall. Notice his demeanor, the pace of his diction, the colors of his clothing and background – all conveying a vulnerability that begs for understanding, patience, faith, loyalty and forgiveness.

Whether a Toyota lover or not, this is a case study that will go down in history for how to deal with a global customer experience that not only affected customer loyalty but also their safety . You be the judge of how their campaign might better serve you in your particular industry.

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