How to Increase Customer Advocacy and Loyalty with Jay Baer

February 18, 2016

Do you struggle to embrace your negative customer feedback?

Are you looking to leverage that feedback to increase customer advocacy and loyalty?

A single answer to a customer complaint has the potential to increase customer advocacy by 25%. By acknowledging and embracing your onstage haters, your brand has the ability to increase revenue and win life long fans.

This week on the Social Media Social Hour, I am joined by Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, best-selling author, keynote speaker, and social media and digital marketing expert on how to increase customer advocacy and loyalty, and hug your haters.

Let’s do this!

About the show:

The Social Media Social Hour is a podcast for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to get on the social media fast track. The podcast is an interview format, where each week I get up close and personal with top brands and influencers to talk social media, tech and online marketing. Each week I also share tools that I personally use to help me with social media management, sales, marketing, accounts management, and productivity. The Social Media Social Hour is presented by Scoreboard Social.

In this episode, here is what you’ll discover:

About Jay Baer:

Jay Baer has spent 23 years in digital marketing, consulting for more than 700 companies during that period, including 32 of the FORTUNE 500. His current firm – Convince & Convert – provides digital marketing advice and online customer service advice and counsel to some of the world’s most important brands like The United Nations, Allstate, Cisco, and Cabela’s.

His new book, Hug Your Haters, is the world’s first modern customer service manual, showing how companies large and small can benefit from the enormous increase in online complaints and customer feedback.

His second book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help not Hype, was #3 on the New York Times business best seller list, and a runaway #1 Amazon best seller.

Jay speaks approximately 60 times per year world-wide, often with lessons about how businesspeople can use today’s shifts in technology and consumer expectation to gain or keep more customers.

Jay’s Convince & Convert blog was named the world’s #1 content marketing blog by the Content Marketing Institute, and is visited by more than 250,000 marketers each month. Jay also hosts and produces the Social Pros podcast, which is downloaded 25,000 times monthly and was named 2015’s best marketing podcast by the Content Marketing Awards.

A fixture in social media, Jay is the most retweeted person in the world among digital marketers, and the second most retweeted person in the world among B2B marketers. He is also an active venture capitalist, and is an investor or advisor to 15 early stage technology and social media companies.

Convince & Convert is the fifth multi-million dollar company Jay has started from scratch. Before his move into digital marketing in 1994 he was a brand marketer and a political consultant, with major roles in state, federal and presidential electoral campaigns.

Mentionable Quotes:

  • “We discovered a real collision and confusion between the marketing department, customer service department, and operations department, when it came to customer service in public (social media, review sites, etc.).”
  • “I realized that the brands that are doing and performing the best are the brands that have made a disproportionate commitment to customer service and the customer experience.”
  • “Customer service really is the new marketing.”
  • “Your competitors can and will steal everything from you eventually, but the one thing they can never take from you, is if you genuinely care more about your customers than they do.”
  • “80% of businesses say that they deliver superior customer service, but only 8% of customers agree.”
  • “1/3 of all customer complaints are never answered.”
  • “40% of people who complain on social media expect a response in about an hour. The average business responds (if they respond at all) in 5 hours.”
  • “There are two types of haters, offstage haters (those who complain in private) and onstage haters (those who complain in public).”
  • “Offstage haters expect an answer 90% of the time.”
  • “Onstage haters don’t necessarily expect an answer, but are seeking an audience and a group empathy moment, but one unexpected interaction from a brand can increase customer advocacy by 25%.”
  • “The hug your haters formula is to answer every complaint, on every channel, every time.”
  • “You should be responding publicly to reviews.”
  • “Customer service is a spectator sport.”
  • “Never ever, ever, answer a customer in a public venue more than twice, under any circumstance.”
  • “Be really careful about trying to shift channels on the first touch.”
  • “71% of social media complaints are from people who originally complained by phone or email.”
  • “The most overrated thing in business and life is praise. Negative feedback and criticism teaches you everything.”
  • “Haters are your most important customers, because they are taking their time to tell you how to improve your business.”
  • “Just one answer to a customer complaint can increase customer advocacy by 25%.”
  • “If you solve your customer’s problem, your customer becomes more loyal to your business over time, than if they never had a problem at all.”
  • “Answering a customer’s problem appropriately has 20x the impact than a single advertisement.”
  • “How can we help customers solve their own problems?”

Items/people mentioned in the show:

Jay’s Social Media Six Pack:

  • How many flights did you take in 2015? 165-175
  • What’s your favorite airport? Minneapolis
  • What’s your least favorite airport? Newark and Orlando
  • What’s your go-to airport snack? Chick-fil-a
  • What’s your go-to activity on an airplane? Working
  • Which do you value more, your customer loyalty or a direct flight? Customer loyalty (Delta!)