How can you foster
participation without opening the door wide open to potentially brand-damaging
content? Here are a few ideas to improve customer relationships and
bring your business into the era of interactive customer communication.
Feedback forms.
Let them talk to you online, anonymously. Make sure you answer queries
within 24 hours – from a live person with an actual personality,
preferably. It’s OK if the response actually uses a standard
template, but don’t make it sound like one. Publish some of
the best dialogues in a dynamic FAQ section. Let your customer see
you're actively communicating with your community.
User reviews.
If you’re concerned about combining product/service info with
reviews, such as the integrated product/review page featured in Amazon's
model, consider a user review section that provides a home for active
voices yet doesn’t conflict with the ready-to-buy visitor in
need of “just the facts.”
Word-of-mouth.
Let your customers do the marketing for you! Word-of-mouth (WOM),
or viral marketing, is one of the most talked about forms of marketing
today. Enlist a few enthusiastic, connected customers to demo your
product or service and write about them in their own blogs, in related
forums, or on your site. You can set some guidelines about appropriate
content, but giving them creative license is going to reflect as more
genuine and influential. People trust unbiased, third-party user perspectives
much more readily than corporate-generated content.
You can launch all
the ads your budget can handle on how trustworthy your brand is, but
the fact is, people are more likely to buy when they hear it straight
from another trustworthy human being or when they witness good customer
communication in action.
You can't control
everything people say about your company, but you can control how in
touch you are with their needs and wants. Open up the lines of communication
and discover just how it easy it may be to vastly improve your image,
products and relationships.
