If you are at all involved in social media and content marketing, you probably know who Jay Baer is – or have at least heard his name. After all, he is the world’s most retweeted person among digital marketers. As a prominent business strategist, keynote speaker and the New York Times best-selling author of five books, he has traveled the world helping businesspeople get and keep customers.

That’s why we were so excited to get him to headline our latest AZIMA event!

For AZIMA’s February event, Jay Baer came to Phoenix to share his knowledge with our marketing community. He led an afternoon workshop and delivered an evening presentation around his latest book, “Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Customers.” Everyone at the event received a copy of the book, as well as participated in a discussion around its key themes. Highlights from our time with Jay are noted below. He shared some fantastic advice for those looking to up their marketing game and turn haters into brand advocates!

After extensive research, Jay uncovered the following insights:

• 80 percent of organizations think they are doing customer service well, but only 8 percent of their customers agree
• Answering one complaint online increases customer love up to 25 percent
• By 2020, customer experience will be more important than price

If this is the case, businesses need to make sure they handle customer complaints carefully and strategically.

Types of Haters

Jay says that online customer service is a spectator sport, and there are two types of haters: offstage and onstage. The majority of a brand’s audience are offstage haters. This group is composed of those who complain in private, either by calling the company directly or writing a personal email. Onstage haters generally want an audience, so they make their complaints public.

How to deal with each group should be part of your marketing strategy.

• Offstage response: Contact the person via the platform he or she contacted you through. If they called to speak with someone, don’t respond with an impersonal email. These people call to get answers.
• Onstage response: First, find all mentions of the issue across the web so you can get a complete picture. Then, practice empathy and answer publicly. Jay recommends keeping responses to only two per channel for this group. Violating this rule could drag you into a vortex of negativity and hostility – it’s also a waste of time. These haters contact to get an audience.

Your haters only know what they can see.

Knowing who your haters are and what they are looking for is only half the battle. To truly improve customer experiences, you need to be able to understand the challenges of your audience.

Haters might not know that all of your management staff was sick the week they had poor service, or that there was an equipment failure that slowed things down. They are simply reacting to their service. So, before responding to haters, try to understand their perspective and where they are coming from based on the information they have available to them.

The moral of the story is, don’t ignore your haters and assume they will go away. In an age of easy access to information, form a strategy to handle less-than-positive experiences and use them as a beneficial marketing tactic.

Thank you to all of you who made it out to meet Jay and hear him speak! We were so lucky to have Jay Baer give us a rundown  of his new book and share his insights with us. A special thank you also goes out to SpyFu for sponsoring this incredible event!

*A special thanks to Jessica Ropolo for her expert help with writing this post.