Thursday, March 25, 2010

How to treat people, customer or not

It's no secret that bad news travels fast, and no secret that news of bad customer service travels faster. With the technology available today, one person doesn't tell 10 people. they tell 10,ooo people.

So why am I telling you what you already know? Because it appears that a fellow over at www.noblesamurai.com knows this, and knows how to turn a potentially bad experience into a good one. It wasn't hard either, he just did one thing;

He was nice.

Not over annoyingly nice.Not fake nice. Just nice.

Here's the back-story as concise as I can make it.

A few days ago I was reading my twitter feeds and I noticed an article about domain names .It was well written, but I had some slight concerns which I posted in the comments. I saw the comments on the page and navigated away.

I came back later to check the post and notice my comment was gone, and I didn't see any others that disagreed the with the article. It appeared that disagreement was frowned upon and edited in this forum.

I tweeted that concern to the world at large being sure I used "noblesamurai" and not "www.noblesamurai.com", so the url wouldn't be shortened and every one would know what site I was tweeting about.

Here's where it gets good. Some short time later I received a tweet from Brent Hodgsen of noblesamurai.com. without going into the whole conversation, he found what had happened, explained it and never once showed any issue with my disagreeing with the article. In fact he was quite pleasant.

Now I still don't agree 100% with that article. I don't have need for their products either. However, because of the way I was treated I would have no problem recommending someone check their products out to see if they may be right for their needs.

That's a beautiful conversion, and one that can't be measured in any analytics tool.