Making your customers your best salespeople (even when they had a bad experience with you)

Guest Author

(Adii here with the tl;dr version of this post. Customer feedback – good and bad – is an important part of your business. Imagine though turning that feedback into your best marketing campaign using the new tools we’re announcing at bottom of this post.)

If you’re anything like any other imperfect business, your customers will probably mostly have good experiences with you. BUT every now and again, they may also have a bad experience.

When you have happy customers, you can easily turn that into a real driver for growth in your business. There are many ways to incentivize your happiest customers to make repeat purchases or you can reward them for helping you kickstart some word-of-mouth marketing.

The other place where happy customers generally shows up in Ecommerce businesses is within their product reviews and ratings. This social proof breeds credibility and trust with your customers that will often influence their purchasing decisions.

This opportunity then also creates your first challenge: How do you get more reviews and feedback from your customers? (More on that later.)

But in saying that, it also exposes the opportunity that most business owners overlook or avoid: What are you doing about the bad feedback and reviews you’re getting?

One of our earliest features we ever built was our Feedback tool. This post is now more than 3 years old and to this day, we help thousands of Ecommerce businesses to have quick, powerful conversations with their customers.

Imagine you could use your product reviews and ratings in the same way. Instead of it being an end-goal in its own right (which is how other product review and rating tools are set up), maybe you can see it instead as the start of a conversation.

Your untapped opportunity: turning a customer’s frown upside-down

Have you ever had a bad experience in a restaurant?

Or have you received a product you purchased online and then it just didn’t meet your expectations?

When this happened, did you ever go back to that restaurant or purchase another product from that online retailer? I bet in most cases, you would say “No”, because those businesses too missed on an opportunity to turn your frown upside-down.

What is often more important is not how you avoid making mistakes, but instead how you address them. The same is true for customers that have bad experiences with you.

But when you then turn that situation around, you will often have a customer for life.

It is exactly this kind of experience that your customers end up telling their friends about. In a typical Hero’s Journey, the end of the story is so much sweeter because the hero had a few hiccups in the middle.

Go from frowns to all smiles in real-time

We are building tools that will help you have more and better conversations with your customers. It is hard to get the attention of your customers, so when they reach out (for whatever reason), we want to empower you to have conversations that converts.

Today we can kickstart that for you with a brand new feature in your CM Commerce dashboard…

Let me tell you what this is not first… We don’t want to spam your inbox and overload you with more emails. NOBODY HAS TIME FOR THAT. Part of having conversations that convert is about focusing on the one’s where you can have the best impact.

This is how our new tool helps you do just that (in 3 quick, easy steps):

  1. In your dashboard, decide for which product reviews you will get notifications (we recommend “All reviews under ★★★”).
  2. We’ll send you a simple notification email about the new review in real-time.
  3. You can reply to the notification to immediately talk to your customer.

And let’s see it in action:

This is the perfect opportunity to engage an unhappy customer and figure out how you can make them whole. They just submitted the review and if you respond soon thereafter, you still have their attention.

Don’t miss this opportunity! This new feature is available in your CM Commerce dashboard today and you can start turning frowns upside-down right away.

More happy customers = better salespeople

Now we can talk about your end-goal again: having happier customers that share their reviews and ratings of your products. You can build a digital army of advocates and salespeople by having fanatical customers.

Most product review and rating tools (CM Commerce’s too until recently) focuses on requesting feedback from customers in a post-purchase email sequence. This is a tried-and-tested method.

CM Commerce would like to however take you to the next level. And we’re in an unique position to do so (as with the other new features we’ve released recently), because we’re an all-in-one email marketing solution. In this scenario it means we can combine our newsletters, advanced customer segmentation and product review functionality to create some magic.

Have you ever encountered one of these problems? (HINT: we’re gonna help you solve these today.)

  1. You have a product that sells well, but you know it can sell better if you only had more reviews and ratings for it.
  2. You have a bunch of customers that never left a review or rating after their purchase.

Starting today, you can request product reviews in bulk in only 3 clicks. Yes – we counted them. Here’s those 3 clicks in action:

Let’s rewind and explain how that works… This tool allows you to quickly select a product for which you need new and more reviews. We then look for all customers who purchased that product in the last 6 months and that has not left a review yet (doing some nifty segmentation for you in the background). And then we draft that into a simple email for you to send to your customers.

There’s nothing more to the process. We do the heavy-lifting and you get all the reviews.

Have products that needs some new ★★★★★ reviews? Get stuck into CM Commerce’s all-in-one email marketing dashboard today and we’ll help you expand every aspect of your business (starting with your reviews of course).

Video music: https://www.bensound.com