Word of Mouth – Helping or Hurting Your Biz

Customer testimonials are important to your business. You want your customers to talk about you in a positive way. With social media use on the rise, it is ever easier for your customers to let their friends know about their experiences. So the question is whether word of mouth marketing is helping or hurting you?

Recently I was witness to a perfect example of how word of mouth affects a business. A web hosting company, noticing a huge spike in traffic, temporarily shut down a web site — thinking the site was under a DOS or spam attack. That seems like a reasonable response, doesn’t it? Of course it does. But what happened next was not exactly what the company expected.

The site in question experienced an upsurge in traffic because of an unfortunate family tragedy. People poured in from all over the world, offering support and condolences. That was what crashed the site. Well-meaning friends tried to contact the web host, to let them know what was happening and to see if the company could do anything to get the site back up.

Due to company policy, though, the web host could not reinstate the site without talking to the site owner. Obviously, they couldn’t release confidential customer information. And they let the friends of the site owner know that they couldn’t do anything. Although this seemed like a reasonable response for the company, it turns out it wasn’t in the eyes of potential customers. It was the perfect opportunity for the company to show they really care about their customers.

Even if they couldn’t turn the site back on, the web host could have expressed sympathy and offered their condolences in the matter. It would have gone a long way toward humanizing their business. But they didn’t offer any condolences, nor did it seem that they even recognized that their actions seemed callous and unfeeling to those contacting them.

Instead of investigating the cause of the site crash, seeing if they could make an exception, they stuck to their policy. Understandably, they need to have guidelines in place. But, instead of creating good will and possibly gaining many new customers with their response, they alienated a potential customer base. Those customers and their money will go elsewhere for service. And the news and subsequent fallout was blasted across multiple web sites and social media. Was it worth it?

You don’t want your company held hostage by the threat of bad publicity. But when you have the chance to do some good, to let people know you care about your customers, wouldn’t you rather do that? Taking just a little time to respond to a problem by acknowledging your customer’s concerns can go a long way in creating a positive image and word of mouth marketing for your business.

If one of your customers came to you, in the midst of a terrible set of circumstances, asking for your help or accommodation for just a short time, what would you do? Be honest with yourself – would you stop and try to help? Or would you think you were being scammed and move on? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

(photo credit:  sxc.hu)