How To Blog Your Way to a Better Relationship

I ended the article, Do Not Fear the Negative Comment, with

That is unless we’ve so burned our customers, we have to prove that we’re not just telling them stories. But that’s a different blog post.

This is that different blog post.

Whether we made the situation or inherited it, sometimes we stand at the foot of a customer disaster or worse at the ruins of a completely burned out customer relationship. Things said and done in the past have been allowed to simmer and get worse.

No sales rep worth his or her paycheck would walk into a customer’s situation without knowing the history and having a plan. An organization with a customer and a serious problem, would expect the sales rep to know both the problem and what might be done. Yet in a strange and curious fashion, that same organization would worry over how to handle that exact issue when running a blog.

A blogger needs to be the same effective strategist when a customer shows up with a problem or a complaint to air. He or she needs to find out the details — the atmosphere, the problem, and the relationships — before he or she writes the first word in response. In other words, listening is the best action to any problem, long before trying to find a solution.

If the situation the blogger is walking into is a new blog to serve customers that have been ignored or abused, then the first post needs to explain how and why things are changing and to state clearly the promises they can rely on.. Everything the blogger does has to live up to those promises. Every word and action must be about regaining trust and credibility. There is no other way.

Of course, that would be the only choice that the sales rep would have too.

People trust people who earn their trust.

People who have been treated badly give their trust slowly.

Bloggers who want to win back customers are willing to earn that trust with patience, grace, always responding in good faith and honesty.

Eventually customers see the consistency and the loyalty to the new promise. It’s the result of the strength of a blogger’s commitment to prove that the customer was worth waiting for. Showing customers that they’re worth listening to. That’s the respect that they lost in the first place.

Liz Strauss